In May 2025, amid reports that Qatar gave U.S. President Donald Trump's Defense Department a free luxury airplane to be remodeled into a new Air Force One, social media users highlighted Trump's old comments about the country. Numerous X users shared footage of the president from his first term purportedly saying the small Middle Eastern country had funded terrorism.
According to those posts, in 2017, Trump said Qatar "is a funder of terrorism at a very high level."
In short, the above video does authentically show Trump making that statement about Qatar in June 2017, during his first presidential term, as shown by media footage from that time and by the full text of his speech from the White House archival website. As such, we have rated this quote as being correctly attributed to the U.S. president.
Trump was speaking on June 9, 2017, at a news conference with Romania's then-President Klaus Iohannis. The full text of his statement is available on the White House's archived website for the first Trump administration. During the news conference, the U.S. president addressed a recent trip he made to Saudi Arabia where he spoke at the Arab Islamic American Summit. He then claimed Qatar funded terrorism (emphasis ours):
I addressed a summit of more than 50 Arab and Muslim leaders — a unique meeting in the history of nations — where key players in the region agreed to stop supporting terrorism, whether it be financial, military or even moral support.
The nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level, and in the wake of that conference, nations came together and spoke to me about confronting Qatar over its behavior. So we had a decision to make: Do we take the easy road, or do we finally take a hard but necessary action? We have to stop the funding of terrorism. I decided, along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, our great generals and military people, the time had come to call on Qatar to end its funding — they have to end that funding — and its extremist ideology in terms of funding.
CNN published footage of the news conference on its YouTube account in June 2017. Trump made the comments in question at the 1:36 mark in the video below:
On May 11, 2025, ABC News reported the Trump administration's Department of Defense was going to receive a super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the Qatari royal family as a gift that would be worth $400 million. According to The Washington Post, anonymous officials reportedly said the plane would require billions of dollars in retrofitting to meet U.S. Air Force requirements.
Former U.S. officials also reportedly told the Post the jet would need to be rebuilt to meet U.S. security standards for transporting the president.
While facing criticism from Democrats for accepting the airplane as a gift from Qatar, Trump defended his decision in a post on TruthSocial:
So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. Anybody can do that! The Dems are World Class Losers!!! MAGA
According to ABC News, the plane would be transferred to the U.S. Air Force, which would modify it for use. By January 2029, after Trump's second term ends, it will be transferred to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation.
Snopes previously reported that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Qatar's gift would be "accepted in full compliance with all applicable laws," and that "President Trump's Administration is committed to full transparency." An administration spokesperson told Snopes that the plane would "not be presented nor accepted this week while [Trump is] in Qatar." (As we noted in our past coverage, Trump went to the Middle East for a three-day tour on May 12.)