EVERETT, WA — President Donald Trump spent forty-three minutes Friday standing inside a half-built Boeing 747 staring at an exposed bundle of wiring as if it had personally insulted his mother, before announcing that if the company couldn’t finish his new Air Force One by the end of the year, he had several contractors in Palm Beach who would do it for cash, no questions asked, and “much better, actually, you’d be surprised.”
The visit, billed by the White House as a “fact-finding inspection” into Boeing’s years-long delays on the two replacement VC-25B presidential aircraft, quickly devolved into what one aide described, unprompted, as “the longest and loudest episode of Pimp My Ride ever recorded on federal property.” The President spent much of the tour pointing at things and asking why they weren’t gold.
Boeing’s defense division is now roughly four years behind on a fixed-price contract that the company has already lost more than $2.4 billion on, a figure Trump referenced repeatedly and incorrectly, rounding it up to “eight, maybe nine billion, a tremendous number, the biggest number.” He then suggested Boeing executives had been stealing the planes, a claim that appeared to surprise the Boeing executives standing next to him.
“The President raised several concerns about the aircraft’s interior finish, cabin layout, and what he called ‘the general vibe,'” said Preston Halliwell, a senior Boeing communications officer who has aged visibly since January. “We did our best to explain that the aircraft is a flying command-and-control platform for continuity of government during a nuclear exchange. He asked if we could still put a chandelier in it.”
At one point, according to two pool reporters and one confused union machinist, Trump walked over to an unpainted section of fuselage, rapped it twice with his knuckles, and declared that the livery Boeing had prepared — the traditional robin’s-egg blue designed by Jacqueline Kennedy in 1962 — looked “like a dentist’s office in Delaware.” He then produced, from somewhere, a napkin sketch of a red-white-and-gold scheme he described as “much more, you know, winning.”
The President further proposed personally overseeing a redesign committee consisting of himself, his son Eric, a man named “Bobby who does the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago,” and “whoever does the jets for the Saudis, because their jets are unbelievable, the best jets, honestly better than ours, which is sad.” No White House staffer present corrected any part of this.
Defense analysts reacted with the professional composure of people who have had to react to things like this for nine years running. “The VC-25B is not a vanity project. It is a hardened aerial nuclear command post,” said Dr. Cassandra Mehlenbaum, a senior fellow at the Lexington Institute for Strategic Aviation. “You cannot have Bobby from the ballroom installing the EMP shielding. I am begging someone to explain this to him. I have been begging for a long time.”
Boeing’s stock, which has had the kind of year typically associated with regional banks and crypto exchanges, dipped another 1.8 percent during the President’s remarks, then recovered slightly after he said the company was “doing tremendous, really tremendous,” and then dipped again when he added “but also terrible.”
Trump’s frustration is, in fairness, not entirely unearned. The original Air Force One replacement contract — a fixed-price deal he himself negotiated during his first term as proof of his deal-making prowess — is widely considered the worst deal Boeing’s defense arm has ever signed, a distinction that has become considerably harder to achieve in recent years. The planes are now projected for delivery in 2027, 2028, or, per one engineer who asked not to be named, “spiritually, never.”
Asked whether the President understood that the aircraft in question would likely not be delivered until after the end of his term, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that timelines were “flexible” and that the President had a “very creative interpretation of what ‘finished’ means.” She then declined to clarify whether that interpretation included the plane being able to take off.
As the tour concluded, Trump told assembled workers that they were “the best, the absolute best, even though the plane is a disaster,” and floated the possibility of awarding the contract instead to “a guy I know who makes unbelievable boats.” Several machinists nodded in the grim, polite way Americans nod at their relatives during holidays. One quietly returned to wiring an avionics bay that will, statistically, outlive everyone in the hangar.
The President departed on the current Air Force One — a thirty-four-year-old Boeing 747-200 that has functioned, reliably, through six administrations — and reportedly spent the flight back to Washington drawing additional chandeliers on a cocktail napkin.