President Donald Trump took some time out of his morning to announce his very first trip on the Qatari jet he was gifted last year, bragging about the Air Force One replacement he claims was “free” while dodging questions about how much it actually costs.“Air Force One was 35, 36 years old. It would be parked next to the new [jets] like this, and it didn’t look appropriate for our country,” Trump told reporters outside Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday morning. “The country is very proud of it.… You can low-key it, or you can show it. And I think the country should be very proud of it.”Andrew Harnik/Getty Images“What’s your favorite upgrade to the new plane, and how much did it cost American taxpayers to upgrade the plane?” a reporter asked.“Very little relative to what it would cost if we did it a different way. This was a gift from a country that’s treated us very well, they’re an ally of us over in the Middle East—Qatar. And I went to Boeing, I said ‘who has the best one?’ Qatar, there’s never been a plane like it,” Trump replied, not actually answering the question. “The Emir [of Qatar], Tamim [bin Hamad Al Thani], who’s a great gentlemen, he said, ‘No, no, I’d like to make a contribution to the country.’ So it was very nice. We were able to do it in about five months, bring it up to the presidential standard—meaning security-wise. You’re gonna get a kick out of it.”Q: How much did it cost American taxpayers to upgrade the plane?TRUMP: It cost very little relative to what it would cost if we did it a different way. This was a gift from a country that's treated us very well. pic.twitter.com/JNd27YeGpR— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 1, 2026 The jet—one of the largest presidential gifts ever—is valued at $400 million. The Air Force said it spent around $400 million on renovating the plane, changing the cabin layout, communications system, and security upgrades. That doesn’t account for the taxpayer-funded, continued maintenance of the plane, either.Editor’s Pick:President Trump’s 927-page 2025 financial disclosure shows that he made over $2 billion during his first year back in the White House, thanks to cryptocurrency, foreign real estate, stock trading, and more.The disclosure, released on Tuesday by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, revealed that more than half of those earnings come from the president’s various cryptocurrency endeavors. He took in $526 million in token sales from World Liberty Financial, the crypto group run by his sons Eric and Donald Jr., and $635 million from a license agreement with a company connected with his $TRUMP meme coin.Critics noted that the wealth from the meme coin in particular wasn’t trickling down to any of the regular people who invested in it.“If you invested $10,000 in Trump coin on January 20th, 2025, it would be worth $415 today,” liberal podcaster Chris Mowrey wrote Tuesday on X. “You lost everything. He made half a billion.”Trump also raked in nearly $60 million from licensing fees for foreign real estate projects in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, India, Bucharest, Vietnam, the Philippines, Oman, and Scotland. He saw nearly $80 million in earnings last year from his Mar-a-Lago resort.The president made money in the stock market as well, buying or selling a whopping 21,000 times with companies he talks about publicly like Nvidia and Intel. His initial self-reporting of his trading last year showed only 800 transactions—way less than what he actually did. He also received over $350,000 in “gifts and travel reimbursements”—Super Bowl tickets, World Cup tickets, NASCAR tickets—from wealthy individuals trying to curry favor with him.The president maintains that he has no active role or conflicts of interest in managing his ever-increasing wealth. He was asked to respond to criticism that he was “profiting off the presidency” on Wednesday morning.“Well, you know why I’m profiting? Because the stock market’s going up. Everybody’s profiting,” he said. “I’m profiting because I have a lot of money, and a lotta cash, and I give it to institutions.” Q: Critics say you're profiting off the presidencyTRUMP: I'm profiting because the stock market is going up. Everybody is profiting. Thank you President Trump. pic.twitter.com/3KrZsB1yJc— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 1, 2026 E. Jean Carroll is wasting no time collecting the $5.8 million President Trump has to pay her after the Supreme Court refused to hear his effort to overturn his defamation verdict.Following the court’s decision Monday, Carroll immediately moved to collect from the bond Trump deposited in the court’s registry. Carroll is requesting the $5 million ordered in the jury verdict in the defamation case, as well as nearly $800,000 in interest due to the delayed payment.But even though the Supreme Court is supposed to be the end of the line, the president is still trying to delay paying up.Trump should have no ability to delay the court decision, as not a single justice registered a dissent. But he has difficulty accepting when things don’t go his way, especially in his second term as president. After the court turned him down Monday, Trump crashed out on Truth Social.“Surprisingly, the Supreme Court declined to ‘review’ a Fake Case brought against me by a woman I never met (Decades old celebrity photo line, standing with her husband, does not count!),” Trump posted.“This Case is really against the United States of America, and all it stands for, and should never be allowed to happen to another President, or Candidate to be!” Trump added.Future presidents and candidates hopefully won’t have a long, dragged out case of sexual assault against them where they refuse to admit wrongdoing and repeatedly defame their accuser. Trump has made history in multiple ways as president, including a refusal to just take the L and move on. It’s not like he can’t afford the payout, anyway.Editor’s Pick:President Donald Trump invited Tina Peters, the former Colorado county election clerk found guilty of tampering with voting machines, to the White House on Tuesday. Trump took to Truth Social to brag about the “honor” of meeting up with a fellow election denier. “Tina Peters just came to the White House to thank me for getting her released from prison in Colorado,” the president wrote. “She was put there because she found Election Fraud, but instead of arresting the people that committed the Fraud, they arrested her!”Trump posted a photograph of the two of them smiling from behind his desk in the Oval Office.Peters became a mascot of the MAGA movement’s supposed victimhood after she was sentenced to nine years in prison for conspiring to publicize the voting machine records in Mesa County. She turned all the cameras off while allowing fellow election denier Conan Hayes to copy, photograph, and download information in an effort to prove Trump’s election fraud claims in 2020. Peters was freed from prison after the Trump administration pressured Democratic Colorado Governor Jared Polis into granting her clemency.“What she went through should never happen to anyone again,” Trump wrote. “Just think of it, she caught the Democrats cheating, and they put her in jail for Voter Fraud.”Of course, the Mesa County district attorney’s office uncovered zero evidence to back up Peters’s claims of voter fraud. The only evidence of any election meddling in 2020 came from Trump’s own camp. Read more about Peters:Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s complaints about media coverage came back to bite him Tuesday.A federal judge ordered a preliminary injunction against the Defense Department’s restrictions on press access to the Pentagon, based in part on “a consistent stream of derisive comments beginning shortly after the confirmation of Secretary Hegseth and continuing through the present.”U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman temporarily blocked a rule stating that all journalists visiting the Pentagon were required to have an official escort while a lawsuit The New York Times filed against the rule is reviewed in full by the court.“This court has spoken at several points about the critical importance of protecting the freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment, and that evergreen message bears repeating,” Friedman wrote.Hegseth has criticized media outlets whose coverage has not reflected well on himself or the department. The judge quoted Hegseth’s March attack on the Times, where he accused the paper of “slashing and burning people to ruin their reputations.”Friedman quoted Hegseth’s complaints about the “legacy Trump-hating press” peddling “endless stream of garbage,” as well as the time he compared reporters to the biblical “Pharisees” who “held counsel against [Jesus]” and “scrutinized every good act in order to find a violation, only looking for the negative.”The judge also made sure to include several quotes from Sean Parnell, the assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs, including when he called the Times “garbage.”In October, the Department of Defense said that it would revoke the press passes of journalists who shared classified or unclassified information without the Pentagon’s preapproval. The Times sued, and Friedman ruled in the newspaper’s favor in March, after which the DOD issued a revised policy with the escort rule. In May, the Times sued again over the new rule, which prevented journalists from free movement around the building in authorized spaces without an escort.The DOD has argued that reporters have gained sensitive information based on roaming around Pentagon headquarters, alleging that they “maintain a persistent physical presence near sensitive spaces within the Pentagon.” It has also granted press credentials to friendly right-wing media outlets and influencers at the expense of critical outlets. On Tuesday, though, Hegseth and the rest of the department had to face the consequences of their own words and actions.More on the courts: