All the President’s Planes

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From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily.

Last month, President Trump made a dramatic exit from a visit to Turkey.

He switched his plane to the last minute to an older Air Force 1, which caused confusion

and prompted concerns about the safety of the President's planes.

But this week, we learned that was all a ruse.

And so today I'm joined by Maggie Haberman, who tells us the story of a third plane.

How Trump got on it and why the administration worked so hard to keep it all a secret.

It's Wednesday, August 12th.

Maggie Haberman, welcome back to The Daily.

Rachel, thanks for having me.

So Maggie, our colleague Tyler Pageer was on the show a few weeks ago, and he told us

the story that is probably by now a little familiar, which is that Trump switched off of

a jet he had gotten from the Qataris, and he switched to the old Air Force 1 plane because

of a credible threat.

And what this did was it prompted a lot of concerns that the Qatari jet was not properly

outfitted with whatever safety measures it would need in order to carry the President's

safety.

Now the administration, as we know, was not happy that we reported that.

Some of our colleagues got subpoenaed, and all of this made for a very dramatic story.

And now we have come to learn that we didn't actually know the half of it.

Yeah, so as often happens with White House in general, we often don't know the half of

it.

This is a particularly vivid example of not knowing the half of it for a variety of reasons,

Rachel.

Please tell us the story.

So what we knew was that the President was in Turkey for the NATO summit, and he had

taken this new jet that had been donated by Qatar that had previously flown some Qatari

royals.

It's more luxurious than the very old commissioned bowings that first went into use in 1990,

and that the President has complained about a lot.

I cannot stress to you how large that Qatar plane is.

I flew on it as pool last week, and it's really big, and I don't like flying.

And I was very struck by how big it was.

It's overwhelming.

You and I actually talked about that plane on the show before, and I believe we referred

to criticisms of it as a flying bribe.

But please go on.

Those were the criticisms of it, and still are.

Right.

Regardless, it was pushed into service very quickly because the President wanted it

to be a quick, and that meant that it did not have the same security specifications that

the older Air Force ones do.

So he is in Turkey.

He's on this plane that he was very, very proud of.

I mean, really, this is somebody who actually does know a lot about airplanes.

He's on them.

He talks about them a lot.

People in his government in term one were pretty surprised by it.

Number two, likes talking about the new toys aspect.

And this was what his own AIDS would say.

Suddenly, he posted on truth social, they were going to fly the older Air Force one,

which often travels as a backup with another Air Force one for a quote unquote old time

sick.

He was going to meet up with the newer plane, the Katari plane at a military base in the

UK.

For anybody who has heard Donald Trump talk about the old Air Force one, the notion of

old time's sake was a little hard to believe because he was constantly criticizing it.

Correct.

And he kind of sentimental trip he would want to take.

So that instantly raised a lot of questions for the reporters who were both with him and

back here in the US.

That's a lot of press.

He got asked about it at this press conference.

I like you to address speculation that you were leaving Ankara not in the new Air Force

one because of security concerns involving Iran.

He started talking about, you know, the life of a president is very dangerous.

Now he's the number one target for Iran.

It's a great dangerous profession.

No, I'm number one on the kill list for Iran.

They're lovely people.

I'm number one.

So I don't know.

I can't tell you that, but I don't really care because I'm doing my job and I'm doing

it.

I hope better than anybody's ever done it because we have a company.

And that comment further raised questions about what might be on his mind and what exactly

was happening here in terms of how they were departing Turkey.

Thank you all very much.

We'll see you back.

You know, the press conference is over fairly soon.

He went to the Ankara airport.

He got into the older Air Force one.

That plane took off.

The reporters on it were told to lower their window shades, which was a real flag for

me and other people at the time because it was evocative of furtive trips the presidents

have taken into war zones before.

For instance, when presidents have landed in Iraq, they were told to put the window shades

down so that lights are not shining out because they can be a target.

So this plane arrives in the UK and it's sitting on the tarmac for a little bit and then

the reporters disembark and then soon after that, the president disembarked shortly before

11 p.m. local time and he walks from Air Force one, the older one, to the Katari plane.

So those were the known facts and then our reporters got hit with subpoenas for reporting.

The concerns about a threat and also the deficiencies in the defensive capabilities of

the new plane.

What we've learned since is that the president wasn't on either one of those plans.

He was on a third plane and they were using a decoy measure, which is intended to mask

the president's whereabouts because there was a threat that was as we understand it deemed

credible.

So tell us that story about the decoy.

What are we talking about?

What happened?

What have we learned since our colleagues initially reported that the president had taken

the old Air Force one?

Sure.

And I need to give a massive hat tip to our friends at the Washington Post to broke this

story.

Yeah, we caught up to some of it, but they reported and we reported that the president,

instead of leaving on the older Air Force one, which is what he had said.

And what we had seemed to have seen.

Correct.

And the president and some aides, they walked from that door, which is on the left hand

side of the plane of the old Air Force one, and appears to have walked directly across

to another door where one of those giant catering containers that services Air Plans, commercial

Air Plans to, is attached to the door and it's lifted on a hydraulic.

And the president and some other people get off of the plane and get onto this container.

Just to be clear, this is the thing that we see that is bringing our Air Plane food to

us, right?

That like goes up to a plane and like unloads those trays that we all eat from as we understand

it.

Okay.

So they lower the hydraulic lift and the container comes down and at the same time the

reporters are being told to close their window shades, which apparently was done so that

they couldn't see any of this.

That cart then takes the president either to another vehicle or directly to a third plane.

Wait, okay.

So the president gets on this plane.

Everybody thinks that he's getting on the plane, right?

And instead of actually getting onto the plane and getting to wherever the president sits,

you're saying he walks directly across and gets into a catering cart.

Correct.

What it made me think of instantly was Taylor Swift, you know, in that cleaning cart when

she would go out to her concerts and they would bring her on stage.

So the people in the seats high up backstage at Madison Square Garden couldn't see her

walking on stage.

So it was just the illusion of just suddenly showing up.

And so this obviously was much more serious.

And I somehow doubt that the president enjoyed being in what I can imagine was not the best

smelling catering container.

Anyway.

So he goes for this third plane.

The third plane leaves.

We have no idea whether it left before or after the older Air Force One.

But at this point, the Qatar plane is either at the US military base in the UK already,

or it is about to be when the older Air Force One lands, according to the pool report

filed by the reporter on the plane, it was 10, 16 PM local time.

They de-planned at some point the reporter pool.

And this is typical.

The reporters will get off of Air Force One before the president does.

We will get in place, you know, to wait to capture him coming downstairs and possibly

coming over to talk to the reporters.

In this case, the president did not disembark from this older Air Force One out the front

door that he had been seen going into back in Ankara until 10, 56 PM.

So that's 40 minutes after the plane touches down, wheels down.

That was a fair amount of time during which the president was brought by vehicle, as we

understand it, from the third plane to that other side entrance on the older Air Force

One, and walked off as if he had been there the whole time.

Okay.

So basically, the president does not do a typical thing of disembarking, maybe talking to

reporters.

There's about a 40-minute lag where they sneak him back onto the plane so that nobody is

the wiser.

Is that correct?

What we understand.

Okay.

And so the people who were on the, let's call it the decoy plane for lack of a better term,

up until very recently, up until this Washington Post report, they had no idea that they were

on the plane that the president deliberately didn't use because of a safety threat that

his team at least thought was credible enough to not have him fly on.

Is that right?

Well, we want to be clear about what we know and what we don't know.

Please.

We don't know whether any of them knew or didn't know what was happening there.

So I don't want to speak broadly.

Fair enough.

Okay.

The reporters absolutely didn't know as far as we're aware.

I think I can speak pretty comfortably to that effect.

Because the thing that I wonder about is whether or not people actually knew at the time,

if I'm one of those people reading this coverage now, I might be thinking to myself, how

much danger was I actually in?

Obviously, nobody takes any chances with the president, of course, but I would imagine

people are wondering like how serious on the sort of the scale of serious threats the

president got this was.

Yeah.

And I don't know that we're going to know the answer to that.

Rachel, what we were told and we've reported previously was that there was a threat that

was from Iranian proxies.

And this is after the president has begun this war on February 28th in Iran.

And it has not gone the way he thought it was going to.

He has long faced threats.

The federal government, the US Secret Service, Intel officials, they all make decisions with

the president's protection as the paramount.

Sure.

That should not be a surprise to anyone.

I hear everything that you're saying, Maggie, about their risk assessment.

I just feel worth pointing out here, though, that the administration has maintained that

Air Force One, that that plane was safe.

And it has also maintained that the Qatar plane was safe.

But if either of these planes were safe, you would not need a decoy to begin with, right?

Like, not necessarily.

Again, we don't know what we don't know.

So I don't want to speak to how these kinds of operations work.

And one of the things that we talked about in our story that posted Monday night and

one of the things that our colleague, Jonathan Swan, and I got into in the book that we wrote about the first year

that Trump was back, regime change, was this siege mentality that this administration has?

Part of it was formed during the 2024 campaign when the president was also facing threats from Iran.

And those stemmed from his drone strike against General Haseem Salamani in early 2020.

Everybody who was connected to that strike in his administration faced threats after the fact.

There were murder for higher plots against him.

There were two unrelated assassination attempts that year, one of them in Butler, Pennsylvania.

So that has been their mindset, you know, that when you're in nail, everything feels like a hammer.

And so I do believe that that impacts some of their decisions.

That having been said, the issue is in part that they have such a credibility crisis, this

administration, they say up is down and night is day about so many things that there will be more

concerns about what actually happened here, about how much risk he was in, about the decision to take this move.

According to our reporting, it was done very hastily.

It was not something that was long planned for.

I don't think that I can speak competently about whether the Cotari plane is safe.

Quote unquote, but they did choose to take this plane that lots of people had concerns about whether it was fully secure.

Then they chose to put out themselves that they were taking a different plane.

Right. And what's so interesting about that Maggie is that like we have been talking this entire time about the Cotari plane,

the Cotari plane, whether it was safe, whether it was safe enough for the president, whether it was rush, etc.

And as you mentioned, the actual story might have nothing to do with that.

The actual story might have to do with some kind of misdirection.

We just didn't know what kind.

I think that the actual story has to do with both I do.

And I will say that while it is obviously unsettling to look back and think about the fact that reporters and some white-house staff and some Air Force staff were on a decoy plane,

the plane that they were traveling on was the safer plane as we understand it in terms of the capabilities.

Should anything compare to the Cotari thing.

And so I do think that that's worth bearing in mind.

But I think the bigger issue is still that we and other journalists are still surmising what we can.

And we don't know what we don't know because this administration, despite its great claims of transparency, actually is not.

We'll be right back.

So,

we'll be right back.

Accenture is working together with the NFL to drive international growth by evaluating markets, developing audience insights,

and creating new ways to engage fans and cities around the world.

The NFL is building a global game, and Accenture is helping make that vision a reality,

by striking the right balance between what makes the NFL beloved in America,

and tapping into the passions and preferences that make each market unique.

Accenture, the official business and technology consulting partner of the NFL.

Learn more at Accenture.com slash NFL.

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Okay, Maggie, I want to talk about the issues around transparency that you mentioned and what that means.

But first, I feel like a lot of people are going to hear this and think

the Secret Service, the President's team, made all of this effort to have a decoy plane and to keep them out of harm's way.

And I wonder how serious that is and was that even for the best?

Was that the right move and what were they assessing?

And I wonder how you would respond to that?

Those are all real questions, Rachel.

And again, I want to be clear here, we are not in law enforcement.

We are not in the intelligence community.

We're not at the Secret Service.

So they have a different job than we do.

And any aspect of the federal government that was involved in this,

they have real reasons for operating the way they do.

And again, their premier concern is keeping the president safe and that is what we would expect them to do.

And based on this scramble, they were behaving as if there was a credible threat.

And they made decisions to try to protect the president.

We know the president has been under a year's long threat from Iran.

The president worries about his own safety, but he doesn't make these decisions on his own.

The entire top of the US government was moving to protect the president.

I don't know anyone among us who would not want to see the president kept safe.

So that is all understandable.

Sure.

That is a separate question than what we're talking about in terms of how it was presented.

And because this administration has claimed emergency powers on other matters so often,

because they never briefed Congress about this war,

because they are blowing up boats that are coming up from the Caribbean

and saying that they are terrorist boats

without really explaining things to the public,

that is part of why the press and not only the press often want to hear more.

Right. You were basically saying,

this should not just be dismissed as a simple story of the secret service

being very competent and keeping the president safe.

That the lack of transparency makes this more complicated for an administration

that has claimed such broad powers and is basically pushed the envelope in so many ways.

Can you just explain a little bit more about that Maggie?

Because the inverse is that reporters should have known that he was sneaking out of a catering cart.

Like that also feels like that would be a security verse.

So just explain a little bit what the line is between what reporters should know

and what they should report and whether this is unusual in some way.

It's a fair question.

And on some of these things, obviously, these are judgment calls.

But there have been other instances where presidents have used decoys.

The very famous one is when Bill Clinton was taking a plane from India to Pakistan.

This was in the spring of 2000.

And this plane that looked like Air Force One,

the press could see, touch us down and they emerge, but an unmarked plane,

according to reports at the time landed and then Bill Clinton gets off that plane.

And there was a very small group of people who were covering this trip.

As reporters, one of them was Susan Page at USA Today.

She knew about this.

She knew ahead of time that this was happening.

And it was out of security concerns.

And she knew because the administration told her.

Correct. The press and security officials summoned her told her what was happening.

They told her about the safety measures that were being put in place for reporters and the president.

And that was something that she agreed to in terms of in terms of covering this.

She agreed to not report on that.

She agreed, at least for her sake, that she knew that the president wasn't on Air Force One,

that they were and she didn't disclose it.

Maggie, can I just why would the administration even bother telling her something that they were

then going to ask her not to report?

It's because these are judgment calls and actually it ensures the president's safety.

In that case, that really is the goal.

There have been presidents, including the current one in his first term, who

went to Iraq on a Christmas trip.

The reporters who were on the plane were called at the last minute.

They were told they had to keep this quiet.

And they did.

And there is a trust factor.

The idea is the president is on the move that you know where he is.

We are making a good faith effort to show you where he is and what has happened.

And that is important.

I mean, there are reasons that the press needs to know where the president is

and so that they can convey it to the public.

And so something like September 11th, 2001, where disaster strikes and the president of the United States

at the time George W. Bush found himself aboard Air Force One with a very slim down press pool.

They knew where he was, but he was making decisions on a moment's notice.

And so it really is about visibility to the public because we are the public size in the airs.

And it also sounds like it's important because it's the administration trying to have

some kind of a trust with the press because as we know, newsrooms, newspapers, news organizations,

they do get requests from the government that says, look, we know you know this, but please

don't report it because of national security concerns.

And those requests are evaluated on a case by case basis.

And so I think what you're telling me is that it is important to have some level of trust between

the administration and the press, which makes me wonder if the breakdown of that trust as indicated

by this story and by the relationship this administration has with the current press.

What the implications are for both, I don't know, the president's safety and also just public safety.

It's a good question.

It is an important point as to why so much mistrust of the media by this White House plus efforts

to try to control what the press is reporting on bases that really they sometimes claim national

security and it's very hard to see where there's an actual national security or privacy concern.

They have used that so many times that it degrades credibility.

The president has criticized coverage he doesn't like as treasonous.

He has as an individual sued news organizations and he is using the levers of government to try to

control broadcast news when he can. And that all creates this very different climate that is not

really productive for anybody, but certainly doesn't help them in a moment when they need people to

believe them that there is something very bad going on potentially.

Is there a world Maggie where because the administration does not trust the press at all

that this is somehow making the president less safe?

I think there is a very good argument for that Rachel. I mean again, they were the ones who made

public that he was taking a different plane and then they got angry that reporters asked about it.

There is a world where there could have been an off the record conversation describing what was

happening where the press would then report it later but would not have potentially jeopardized anybody.

The reality is the press has a different job than they do. Our job is accountability,

but presidents are also accountable to the public. And this is an administration that generally

has not behaved that way. And in this instance at least it really worked across purposes for them.

Maggie Heyberman, thank you so much. Rachel, thanks for having me.

On Tuesday evening, the Times reported that Secretary of State Mark Rubio,

Treasury Secretary Scott Besend, and Stephen Miller, the president's top domestic policy advisor

were all on board the decoy plane. Rubio had been aware of the threat that had kept President

Trump off the plane, but it was unclear who else, if anyone, also knew. And at least some

White House staff traveling on the plane were not aware. We'll be right back.

Accenture is working together with the NFL to drive international growth by evaluating markets,

developing audience insights, and creating new ways to engage fans and cities around the world.

The NFL is building a global game. An Accenture is helping make that vision a reality. By striking

the right balance between what makes the NFL beloved in America and tapping into the passions and

preferences that make each market unique. Accenture, the official business and technology consulting

partner of the NFL. Learn more at Accenture.com slash NFL.

Hey, I'm Tracy Mumford. There is a lot happening right now. The headlines podcast from the New York

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Here's what else you need to know today. Search and rescue efforts continued on Tuesday.

The day after a deadly earthquake struck Columbia with firefighters toiling and searing heat to

pull people out of the rubble. At least 181 people have been confirmed dead so far. With more than

1,300 people injured and 153 buildings collapsed. Officials said they expected the numbers to rise.

Today's episode was produced by Anna Foley and Rochelle Boncha. It was edited by Brendan

Klingkenberg and Devin Taylor and contains music by Alicia B. YouTube, Rowan Niemisto and Pat McCusker.

Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

That's it for the Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.

Accenture is working together with the NFL to drive international growth by evaluating markets,

developing audience insights and creating new ways to engage fans in cities around the world.

The NFL is building a global game. An Accenture is helping make that vision a reality.

By striking the right balance between what makes the NFL beloved in America and tapping into

the passions and preferences that make each market unique. Accenture, the official business and

technology consulting partner of the NFL. Learn more at Accenture.com slash NFL.