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Trump Gaggles with Press at Joint Base Andrews, Jul. 1, 2026

July 1, 2026 · The White House · 0:08:46

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

President Donald Trump spoke with reporters at Joint Base Andrews on July 1, 2026, before boarding for Medora, North Dakota, on what he said was the first flight of the new Air Force One. “This will be the first flight of what I think is maybe the greatest commercial plane ever built,” he said. “Our Air Force One was 35, 36 years old and it would be parked next to the new ones like this and it really didn’t look appropriate for our country.”

Asked what the aircraft cost taxpayers, the President said “very little relative to what it would cost if we did it a different way”: the plane was, as he described it, a gift from Qatar — “a country that’s treated us very well, and they’re an ally of us over in the Middle East” — whose emir “said, no, no, I’d like to make a contribution to the country,” and which was brought “up to the presidential standard, meaning security-wise,” in about five months while the new-build aircraft remained two years out. On Iran, he said “the denuclearization of Iran is moving along well… We hit them very hard for three nights,” and he cited a stock market “setting records virtually every day” and oil “down at 68” a barrel.

Why it matters

The gaggle is the first on-record account of the new Air Force One’s debut — the Qatar gift framing, the cost answer, and the conversion timeline, all in the President’s own words on the day of the first flight. This chronicle files it on the Foreign Policy & Defense hub with the account attributed to the President.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the aircraft’s provenance and cost as stated by the President — a gift from Qatar, converted in about five months at “very little” relative cost — is a dated claim set that official disclosures can be checked against. Noted for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: The White House, “President Trump Gaggles with Press at Joint Base Andrews, Jul. 1, 2026,” Joint Base Andrews, MD, July 1, 2026 (official upload, embedded above). All characterizations as stated by the President in the gaggle.