As catnip for a high-end mendicant like Donald Trump, the Boeing 747-8 is unbeatable. It’s an exquisite machine, a perfect consummation of form and function and last in a line of one of the greatest airplanes ever built. It’s also a haunting specter for Boeing of a supremacy it achieved and then lost.

Boeing has secured a deal with Qatar for up to 210 jets in what the White House is calling the aircraft makers’s “largest-ever” widebody order worth $96 billion dollars.

Boeing scored the biggest aircraft sale in its history in a deal announced yesterday by President Trump. Qatar Airways is buying up to 210 Boeing 787 Dreamliner and 777X aircraft, all made in the U.S. with GE Aerospace engines, the White House announced.