Trump reportedly left Turkey on a secret plane
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- 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 Donald Trump took in July.
After a NATO summit in Turkey, Trump stowed away in an airport catering container to slip into another plane while Air Force One -- filled with White House officials, security and support staff, and reporters -- was sent into the sky essentially as a decoy, just in case Iran made good on a credible threat of an attack.
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.
That Trump’s whereabouts were concealed then, and 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.
The White House hasn’t confirmed reporting on the extraordinary lengths officials took to protect Trump, which were first reported by The Washington Post, but administration officials haven’t denied it.
Instead, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, relied on similar wording that he used during the trip itself. “As the President has said recently, there are many enemies of America who have their sights on him, and we use every tool at our disposal to address those threats,” Cheung said in a statement Monday.
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.