Air Force One: Was decoy ruse fair game?

Trump walking off Air Force One — President Trump leaving Air Force One, not in a catering cart

(Image credit: Samuel Corum / Getty Images)

President Trump has again offered the world a “profile in cowardice,” said Michael Daly in The Daily Beast. Earlier this month, The Washington Post revealed that when Trump departed a NATO summit in Ankara in July, his security team pulled a stunt to protect him from a purported Iranian plot to target Air Force One. Trump boarded the plane along with numerous reporters, aides, and Cabinet members, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But then he was whisked away through a rear door in a catering cart and flown to England on a military jet. Upon arrival, he reversed his steps to covertly reboard Air Force One and rejoin the staff and reporters he had callously turned “into unwitting decoys.” Other presidents have pulled stunts to dodge a threat, said Ian Prasad Philbrick in Slate, such as when Bill Clinton secretly took an unmarked plane from India to Pakistan in 2000. But none used aides and press as “bait.” And those schemes were explained to press members off the record beforehand and then revealed to the public quickly afterward, not “hidden from the public until reporters exposed it” weeks later.

The Secret Service has one job, said Jim Geraghty in National Review: protect the president. There’s nothing “wrong or unethical about misleading the public” to serve that end. As for the outraged reporters: The president is a target, and traveling with him carries risk. There are questions about the seriousness of the threat, a supposed plot to target Trump with a shoulder-fired missile, which was flagged by Israel and dismissed by U.S. intelligence. But the Secret Service can’t just say, “Eh, it’s probably nothing” and take a chance. Certainly not when the threat is Iran, which “puts up billboards and murals of Trump lying in a coffin or drowning in a sea of blood,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Iran’s assassination efforts “are long-standing and help explain why the U.S. is fighting”—for Trump, it’s personal.

It’s no mystery why the White House kept the ruse secret even after “the danger had passed,” said Mohamad Bazzi in The Guardian. The image of the president huddled in a catering cart is “a stark contrast” to his attempts to project “strength and dominance.” It also “encapsulates Trump’s failure in his war on Iran.” He claims we’ve obliterated Iran’s military capability and terror threat, but the Secret Service feared it could reach into our ally’s airspace and threaten his life. Our “strongman” president just bared his weakness to the world “as he hid from the consequences of his own actions.”