A bad deal, or a worse deal?

Why are some sophisticated elites still doing deals with Donald Trump?

Boeing should have rejected then-President Donald Trump’s proposed terms to build two new Air Force One aircraft, the company’s CEO said Wednesday.

Dave Calhoun spoke Wednesday on the company’s quarterly earnings call, just hours after Boeing disclosed that it has lost $660 million transforming two 747 airliners into flying White Houses. 

“Air Force One I’m just going to call a very unique moment, a very unique negotiation, a very unique set of risks that Boeing probably shouldn’t have taken,” Calhoun said. “But we are where we are, and we’re going to deliver great airplanes.”

Then-President Trump, an aviation enthusiast, took a keen interest in the new presidential jets, involving himself in everything from contract negotiations to the plane’s color scheme. As part of the deal, Boeing signed a fixed-price contract that required the company, not taxpayers, to pay for any cost overruns during the complicated conversion of the two airliners.

Then-Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who was dismissed in December 2019, personally negotiated the Air Force One terms with Trump at the White House and the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

This isn’t actually a rhetorical question. On possibility is that this reflects the real rot that has taken place at Boeing since its merger with McDonnell Douglas (in which the culture of the latter essentially swallowed the former), and was just a stupid decision by Boeing.

The second possibility is that Boeing deliberately did what they knew to be a bad deal to kiss a current and possibly future president’s ass. This would be even worse, and of course Trumpism makes this kind of corruption more and more common.