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See the full story · 16 sourcesTrump is facing backlash after leaving staff and reporters on Air Force One unaware of the threat from Iran
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President Donald Trump has defended a ruse that saw him stow away in an airport catering container to slip into another plane while Air Force One, filled with staff, and reporters, essentially worked as an unwitting decoy .
Trump was sent into the sky out of Turkey in the second plane after a recent summit in Turkey because the Secret Service and military wanted him on a “different plane” due to a threat from Iran.
”I think actually the plane that I flew on was at greater risk,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “I think it was at greater risk because that would be the plane I think that they would be more likely to go for.”
After a day of social media memes portraying Trump as hiding out in the catering truck, the president, who often promotes memes of himself as a bold and courageous leader, said he was following the direction of the Secret Service, the agency that protects the president.
“I go by Secret Service and the military. They wanted me to go in a different flight, different plane,” Trump said of sneaking off the presidential plane.
His comments confirmed a report of the actions just in case Iran made good on a credible threat of an attack.
“I just have to do what they say,” Trump told reporters after a trip to Ohio .
Upon stopping in Britain , Trump sneaked back aboard the presidential plane undetected and scoffed when asked about potential danger.
“If I go, you go. Right?” he told reporters — gliding past the fact that if the plane had been shot down, the president wouldn't have been aboard.
Trump is facing growing political backlash over the move, with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer calling for answers.
“The Senate should be immediately briefed on the Iranian threats against the President, the extraordinary measures taken to get him out of Turkey, any risks posed to U.S. personnel, and any threat to the homeland,” Schumer said in a statement Tuesday.
“It is unacceptable that Congress was kept in the dark and instead learned about this serious threat through press reports. Trump has put America’s sons and daughters in harm’s way by getting into an unnecessary and reckless war, and this administration has repeatedly refused to provide Congress and the public with the transparency they deserve.”
Presidents have taken secret overseas trips in the past for security reasons, with schedules and logistics kept classified until after the fact to protect the commander in chief.
But not like the one President Trump took in July.
That Trump's whereabouts were concealed for weeks afterward, is believed to be unprecedented — even in a modern world where security-related subterfuge is not uncommon.
“We have absolutely seen the president fly on unmarked or decoy planes before, into Iraq, Afghanistan , other war-zone-like places,” said Garrett M. Graff, author of “Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die.”
“But this was an ongoing secret that I don’t think we’ve ever seen before.”
The president's flight out of Turkey made headlines at the time because Trump had arrived aboard a luxury jet gifted by Qatar , which was not equipped with some of the same missile detection and countermeasure systems found on older presidential jets.
He ended up traveling in a smaller government aircraft from Turkey to the United Kingdom. There, he sneaked back onto the decoy jet, descended from the aircraft and boarded the Qatari plane.
Presidents have regularly tested the confines of their office, pushing their security advisers to visit war zones as a show of American presence and their own leadership.
Usually, this happens in the form of trips that aren't announced until the president is deemed to be out of harm's way.
What’s different this time is that Trump was covertly separated from the rest of his travelers — including the press pool meant to provide independent coverage of the president and his actions — and, instead of informing the public about what occurred once the risk had passed, the White House still hasn't fully revealed what took place.
Graff said the presence of the White House press corps is as much about protecting “the presidency and democracy” as it is about covering the story.
“This shows that the White House just fundamentally doesn’t understand how important that role is, for the press corps to be able to provide independent and transparent corroboration about the status and whereabouts of the president of the United States at any given moment,” he said.
Officials have gone to great lengths to keep presidents safe on covert trips before.
In 2023, a motorcade pulled away from the White House around 3:30 a.m. on a Sunday, and President Joe Biden later boarded an Air Force C-32, a modified Boeing 757 normally used for domestic trips to smaller airports, and flew to Poland.
Biden then took a secret, 10-hour overnight train ride to Kyiv meant to show solidarity with Ukraine after Russia’s invasion.
A press pool at the White House had been expecting a quiet Sunday for Biden in Washington .
However, two journalists went to Ukraine with him and documented the trip, capturing images of Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky striding past a memorial to fallen soldiers in Ukraine’s capital as air raid sirens sounded.
In Trump's first term, he made a secret trip to Afghanistan on Thanksgiving Day in 2019, when officials kept a separate press pool and decoy plane in Florida to maintain the illusion that the president was spending the holiday at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Instead, Trump and another group of reporters flew to the sprawling U.S. military base at Bagram, where the president spent more than three hours on the ground serving turkey to troops, giving a speech and meeting with Afghanistan's then-preside...
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