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.