One trip, three planes: Trump's secret switch
Washington: From the beginning, something didn't add up.During the closing hours of the NATO Leaders' Summit in Ankara in July, U.S. President Donald Trump posted
Washington: From the beginning, something didn't add up.During the closing hours of the NATO Leaders' Summit in Ankara in July, U.S. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he would not be flying home aboard the new presidential plane that had brought him to the Turkish capital after Qatar gifted it to the administration last year.Instead, Trump said, he had sent the aircraft ahead to Mildenhall Air Force Base in England so servicemembers could tour it. He wrote, without making clear how he would ultimately get home to Washington, that he would fly to Mildenhall aboard an older Air Force One.Also read: Trump says advisers wanted him off Air Force One in Turkey due to threatAs part of the press pool traveling with Trump, I was along for the ride.The itinerary change was confusing, and Trump's explanation seemed implausible. Reporters' questions to one another turned to whether Iran had hatched a concrete plot to assassinate the president. At first, our precise itinerary also remained a mystery, though we assumed we were still heading back to Washington as initially planned after the stop in the United Kingdom.If our initial hunch regarding a security concern proved accurate, the Qatari-provided plane - which is known to lack certain safety features - might not be up to snuff.
That could explain why the White House would want to switch out the planes, and it would mean that we were in for a much more dangerous flight than usual.Trump had inadvertently stoked speculation about potential threats during the final day of the summit on July 8. As he met with various world leaders, from Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa to Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy, he repeatedly brought up Iran's longstanding attempts to kill him in comments to reporters.After a press conference shortly before leaving Turkey in which Trump largely deflected questions about the plane swap, the sense that something was out of the ordinary only grew.As we boarded what we believed was the aircraft carrying the president, White House staff directed journalists to close our window shades. When we pressed for an explanation, we were told it was a request from the Secret Service.Having traveled on the presidential plane before, I knew this demand was atypical. Was it, perhaps, an attempt to obscure some sort of classified defense technology?Only weeks later would we find out that the instruction was designed to help hide a covert operation in which Trump left the aircraft via a catering truck and boarded a different government jet due to a security concern.On Air Force One itself, answers can be surprisingly hard to come by.
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