So the president of the United States crawled onto a catering truck to sneak off his own plane in Turkey, and nobody thought to mention it to the Secretary of State sitting upstairs.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s what CBS News reported and the BBC confirmed. On July 8, during the NATO summit in Ankara, Donald Trump walked onto Air Force One in front of his cabinet, the press pool, and the crew. Then he slipped out the back on a food truck and boarded a completely different military aircraft. The original plane kept the “Air Force One” call signal and took off as a decoy.
Shealeah Craighead (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsLeft behind on that decoy: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and communications director Steven Cheung. Plus the entire White House press corps. None of them knew the president wasn’t on board.
Who went with Trump on the real flight? Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, executive assistant Natalie Harp, Dan Scavino, and Walt Nauta. Funny how the Defense Secretary makes the cut but the Secretary of State gets left sitting on a decoy plane over a country where someone’s been spotted walking around with a shoulder-fired missile.
The official explanation is that Rubio and Bessent stayed behind to “maintain the line of succession.” You know, in case something happened to Trump. Ask yourself what that means in plain English. It means the plan was: if that decoy plane gets hit, the president is safe on the other aircraft, and we’ve still got the constitutional succession chain intact on the decoy. The people on that plane were the backup plan. The human insurance policy.
Acroterion (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsTrump told reporters the military and Secret Service “wanted me to go in a different flight.” He said he gets “a lot of threats” and added, “Any consequential president has a lot of threats.” That’s a nice way of saying the people left behind are less consequential.
Here’s what gets me. The press pool, the people whose job it is to tell the American public where their president is and whether he’s alive, were sitting on a decoy plane with no idea they’d been ditched. When Bill Clinton pulled the same trick flying into Pakistan in 2000, at least his White House had the decency to brief the head of the White House Correspondents’ Association beforehand. Susan Page was told. She kept quiet. That’s how adults handle it.
Florida House of Representatives (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsThis time? Nothing. Jacqui Heinrich, who heads the correspondents’ association now, had to go begging to Trump administration officials after the fact, asking them to maybe, please, consider a protocol for next time. Good luck with that.
The threat itself is worth thinking about. Multiple outlets report someone was spotted carrying a portable surface-to-air missile near the NATO conference. The New York Times says the Iranians knew what hotel floor Trump was staying on. That’s not a vague security concern. That’s a specific,