By admin 
After the NATO summit in Turkey last month, Donald Trump pulled up in a limo, climbed the stairs to the blue-liveried door of Air Force One, then turned and waved. The plane took off from Ankara 20 minutes later, ferrying the president, his entourage, and the journalists who had covered his trip.
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Or so it seemed. In truth, as the Washington Post revealed last night, the White House had pulled a switcheroo. A surreptitious airport catering truck secretly shuttled Trump to a waiting military plane, which flew him out instead. By itself, the story is a bizarre chapter in presidential history. But the context of the bait and switch—including the assassination threat that preceded it, an evident comfort with deceiving and potentially endangering members of his own administration and the press, and even controversy surrounding Air Force One itself—also marries a few themes of Trump’s second term so far.
This sounds like something out of a spy movie. Tell me more!
Here’s what we know. The catering truck, which typically loads in-flight meals, parked on the right side of Air Force One, partially shielded from media cameras. According to the Post, Trump crossed to the other side of the presidential plane after boarding and stepped into the truck’s elevated container. Video shows a suited man climbing into the vehicle’s cab, the container lowering, and the truck pulling away. It then sidles up to a smaller U.S. government jet and elevates its container once again, presumably letting Trump board unnoticed. The smaller plane then flew to the U.K., where Trump stopped en route to Washington, under a nondescript call sign. To help conceal the plot, which one anonymous U.S. official called a “deception operation,” White House officials made journalists aboard Air Force One close their window shades. Once in Britain, according to the New York Times, Trump was covertly ferried back to Air Force One as though he had been aboard the whole time.
That’s pretty elaborate! But why do this? You mentioned something about an assassination threat …?
One doesn’t play Schrödinger’s president just for fun. U.S. officials allegedly devised the ruse after they became concerned about an Iranian threat to target Trump as he left Turkey, which borders Iran. The Wall Street Journal reported today that the intelligence came from Israel and included a threat to shoot shoulder-to-air missiles at Air Force One.
So, besides lying to journalists aboard, the administration basically used them as bait?
You could say that. Journalists—and even some lower-level Trump officials—didn’t realize that the president wasn’t really on the plane with them. Nor were they told of the threat that prompted the switcheroo. Later, asked why reporters had had to close their window shades when leaving Turkey, Trump failed to mention that he had switched flights. “I’m No. 1 on their list,” he said, referring to Iran. “But if I go, you go. Right?” As it turns out, maybe not.
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That’s dark. Has anything like this happened before?
Sort of. U.S. presidents rarely travel without journalists, and it’s even rarer for administrations to conceal the president’s true location. Officials were vague about George W. Bush’s whereabouts immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, and Bill Clinton took an unmarked plane from India to Pakistan in 2000. But even Bush had reporters with him, and Clinton’s staff told at least one journalist about the switch beforehand. Joe Biden’s clandestine 2023 train trip to Ukraine involved a false public schedule, but it also included two journalists—and everyone else found out about it as soon as Biden arrived. Per the Times, though, the Secret Service has occasionally used decoy flights or motorcades to protect presidents.
So is this just a case of liberals criticizing Trump for something other presidents have done?
Presidents rightly expect more security than the rest of us, but that typically comes with greater scrutiny of their locations and activities too. Journalists wrist-slapped Barack Obama in 2010 after he briefly slipped the press pool in Washington to attend his daughter’s soccer game. In Trump’s case, his status near an active war zone was unknown to even senior U.S. officials for hours—and was kept hidden from the public until reporters exposed it more than a month later.
Wait a sec: I remember Trump bragging about a new plane he got from Qatar. So why was the old Air Force One the decoy in this case?
Good memory. Trump flew into Turkey on a luxury Boeing jet that Qatar’s government gave him last year, an offering that was widely seen as a bribe. But on July 8, as the NATO summit ended, the president posted that he would be leaving aboard the older Air Force One, which is still decked out in its Kennedy-era color scheme, “for old time’s sake.” The stated reason was to let U.S. troops at a British base tour the Qatari-gifted aircraft, which had been freshly repainted in red, white, blue, and gold. (This is Trump’s plane, after all.) But as the Times later revealed, the truth was more sinister. Trump’s demands to quickly retrofit the Qatari plane had apparently left it without sophisticated defensive systems, making it more vulnerable to Iranian attacks. The Times reporting enraged Trump, and the administration tried to unmask the paper’s sources before ultimately backing down. In retrospect, though, the president’s post was likely part of the gambit, helping him slip away aboard an entirely different plane.
Speaking of Iran: How is Trump’s war going?
If having to conceal himself inside a catering truck is any indication, not well. The Iranian assassination threat came after the president’s ceasefire fell apart. Since then, the two sides have continued to trade attacks. As my colleague Fred Kaplan explained yesterday, Iranian hard-liners want to keep control of the Strait of Hormuz, a key trade route. Trump, apparently wary of escalating the fight, is hoping that Iran’s economy will collapse. On Tuesday, an American helicopter appeared to have fired a missile at a Panama-flagged container ship that tried to break the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports. In short, lasting peace seems further away than ever.
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