All the President’s Planes

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Last month, President Trump made a dramatic exit from a visits turkey. He switched just plain to the last minute to an older Air Force one, which caused confusion and prompted concerns about the safety of the President's planes. But this week, we learned that was all the rules.

And so today I'm joined by Maggie Heberman, 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 Heberman, welcome back to The Daily. Rachel, thanks for having me. So, Maggie, our colleague Tyler Pageers 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 one plane because of a credible threat. And what this did was it prompted a lot of concerns that the Qataris jet was not properly outfitted with whatever safety measures it would need in order to carry the President safely. 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's 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 short.

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 Qataris 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. Regardless, it was pushed into service very quickly, because the President wanted it 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 term one were

pretty surprised by it. Number two, likes talking about the new toys aspect, and this is what his own aids would say. But 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 Atari 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 sick was a little hard to believe, because he was constantly criticizing it at correct. It didn't seem like the 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 U.S. That's a lot of press. He got asked about it at the press conference. I like you to address speculation that you are 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. How he's a number one target for Iran. It's a very 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 country.

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 for. Thank you all very much. We'll see you back.

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 fertive trips the presidents have taken into a 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 disembark shortly before 11pm 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 to our friends at the Washington Post to broke this story. 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 seen to have seen. Correct. The president and some aids, 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 airplanes, commercial airplanes, too, 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 on to this container.

“Just to be clear, this is the thing that we see that is bringing our airplane food to us, right?”

That goes up to a plane and 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 like 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 and what I can imagine was not the best smelling catering

container anyway. So he goes to 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 guitar 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 p.m. local time. They deplained 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 p.m. 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 his typical thing of disembarking. Maybe talking to reporters. There's about a 40 minute lag where they sneak him back onto the planes. The 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 literally didn't use because of a safety threat that his team,

clear about what we know and what we don't know. Okay. Please don't know whether any of them

knew or didn't know what was happening there. So I don't want to, you know, speak broad 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, the 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, you know, 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 U.S. Secret Service, Intel officials, they all make decisions

“with the president's protection as the paramount. Sure. It should not be a surprise to anyone.”

I hear everything that you're saying, Maggie, about, you know, the risk assessment, but I just feel worth pointing out here, though, that the administration has maintained, that Air Force 1, 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 Soleimani in early 2020, everybody who was connected to that strike in his administration face 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 Atari 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 Atari plane, the Atari plane,

whether it was safe, whether it was safe enough for the president, whether it was rushed, 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, you know, while it is obviously unsettling to look back and think about the fact that reporters and some White House staff and some Air Force stuff 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 any compared to the Atari plane? Correct. 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. I'm Daniel Adkinson. I'm a travel editor at The New York Times. When you're on social media and you see a travel influencer talking about how great a place is, showing you beautiful pictures,

do you know if they got freebies and exchange for promotion? At The New York Times, we get a lot of invitations to take free trips. We turn them down every time. We do not accept any discounts.

We need to maintain our independence to provide you an accurate picture and get the real story behind any trip that you're going to take. It's a big decision to choose where you want to spend your valuable time and money. We want to make sure that that trip is something that's worth it. If this kind of reporting sounds valuable, you can get it and so much more by subscribing to The New York Times. Okay, Maggie. I want to talk about the issues around transparency that you mentioned in

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 years 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 U.S. 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. 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. You are basically saying this should not just be dismissed as a simple

“story of the secret service being very competent and keeping the president safe. 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 person just explain a little bit what the line is between what reporters should know and which 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 that the press could see touches down and they emerge

“but an unmarked plane according to reports at the time landed and then Bill Clinton gets off that plan”

and there was a very small group of people who were covering this trip as reporters, one of the Massachusetts and 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 there 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 her. 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, 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

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 a board 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's eyes and ears. 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 are reported 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 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 Abram and thank you so much Rachel thanks for having me. On Tuesday evening the Times reported the Secretary of State Marker Rubio treasury secretary Scott Bessand and Steven 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.

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