News that Donald Trump would accept a gifted Boeing 747 from a foreign government to use while in office — and park at his presidential library after he leaves the White House — raised eyebrows in a Republican-controlled Washington that doesn’t do that much anymore, NOTUS’ Hill team reported. The White House comms office and Trump himself took turns defending the idea Monday.
Still, no one really knows what swing voters are going to think of it, in part because Trump is not like any other politician when it comes to just about anything, and in part because this is not a scenario political operatives generally plan for. “The possibility of doing something this brazen is so outrageous that we would never have thought to poll on the subject,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me.
There is a group of operatives and academics who have been thinking about political corruption, and how to message on it, for a while now. They gave us some insights from their research, and offered Trump’s opposition a path forward.