National Review
The Ins and Outs of the Air Force One Decoy Ruse
By Jim Geraghty
August 13, 2026 10:04 AM
On the menu today: This week we learned fascinating — and some would say troubling — new details about President Trump’s departure from the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, on July 8. At 8:42 a.m., Trump announced on Truth Social that the new Qatari-donated Air Force One plane would be sent to Mildenhall Air Force Base, in the United Kingdom, “to give them a chance to tour the Aircraft,” and “For old time’s sake, we’ll be taking the former Air Force One, from Turkey to Mildenhall.” But this week we learned that Trump didn’t fly out on that older Air Force One plane. At Ankara Esenboğa Airport, Trump boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras, but was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane — an Air Force C-32A — via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight.
It was an extraordinary measure to avoid the potential risk of a missile attack . . . leaving people wondering whether everyone left on the decoy plane was being deemed expendable. Read on.
Flight Alert
The U.S. Secret Service must be given a wide berth in the decisions it must make to protect the life of the president.
There is nothing inherently wrong or unethical about misleading the public, and the bad guys, about the president’s location, particularly if the president is in circumstances involving a heightened threat of assassination attempts. These sorts of ruses have been used in the past five presidencies:
2000: President Bill Clinton flew from India to Pakistan in an unmarked plane that followed the traditional Air Force One. This was recently revealed by Susan Page of USA Today.
2003: President George W. Bush made a secret trip to visit U.S. troops in Baghdad, Iraq, while the White House told reporters Bush was spending Thanksgiving at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. White House communications director Dan Bartlett told CNN that, traveling in an unmarked vehicle, “The president encountered and witnessed traffic for the first time in three years on the way to the airport.” President Bush also made several unannounced visits to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan throughout his presidency, each one involving secrecy about his whereabouts until he was safely in the war zone or had departed.
2010: President Barack Obama secretly left the country to visit U.S. troops in Afghanistan. “Air Force One took off in secret at 10 p.m. A small pool of journalists was brought along on condition that they not report on the trip until the president landed in Afghanistan. Many White House officials, and most of the Afghan government, were not informed. The president’s advance schedule for Friday listed him meeting with advisers in the Oval Office and then making a public statement on the latest unemployment report.”
2018: Departing Christmas night in secret, President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania flew into Iraq, speaking at a hangar rally at Al-Asad Air Base on the day after Christmas. Trump made a similar trip to Afghanistan for Thanksgiving the following year; during that trip, “The 747 Trump used to travel to Florida earlier in the week remained guarded on the tarmac of Palm Beach International airport throughout the overseas outing.”
2023: For President Joe Biden’s trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, the president left the White House at 4 a.m., boarded a smaller Air Force plane than presidents normally use, with every window shade pulled down, accompanied by just one reporter and photographer instead of the usual press pool — while the White House’s public daily schedule said he was headed to Warsaw.
It is easy to understand why a reporter who was on Air Force Once on the return flight from Ankara would be unnerved to learn that the president had been removed from the plane because the risk of an attack was deemed too high. But the primary duty of the U.S. Secret Service is to protect the life of the president, full stop.
We live in a world where people want to kill the president. If you attend an event that will have the president in attendance, you accept the very small but nonzero risk that you’re going to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Theoretically, anyone who attends a Trump rally accepts the possibility of being remembered like Corey Comperatore. If you cover the White House, there’s always a chance that you will be told to evacuate or shelter in place because there is an immediate threat to the building. You accept a small risk whenever you walk into a government building, or a courthouse, or a New York City skyscraper, or a U.S. embassy.
And if you are one of the pool reporters who travels on Air Force One, you accept the small but real risk that some terrorist group or hostile power will attempt to shoot down the plane. (We all saw Air Force One and Iron Man 3.)
It is a little surprising to learn that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent were on the plane that was deemed insufficiently safe for the president. But if a whole bunch of senior U.S. officials did not get on that plane, there was undoubtedly a risk the bad guys would have seen through the ruse. (That isn’t stopping some people from noting who was chosen to travel with the president on the safe plane, and who was left behind on the decoy plane.)
With that in mind, we should keep in mind that in some tragic alternate universe, the headlines of July 8 might have been:
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AIR FORCE ONE SHOT DOWN BY MISSILE, IRANIANS SUSPECTED
RUBIO, BESSENT, 80 OTHERS BELIEVED DEAD
LAST-MINUTE SECRET SWITCH SAVED PRESIDENT
block quote end
And the July 9 headline in the New York Times would have been the same: “New Air Force One Lacks Defensive Countermeasures of Previous Model, Officials Say.”
There’s no getting around it: Despite the assurances of the administration and the U.S. Air Force, the new Qatari-donated Air Force One was not as safe as the old one — in a way that could have life-and-death consequences. The new plane “lacks the same defensive countermeasures that were security features of the old model, including its advanced antimissile capabilities, according to multiple officials who have been briefed on how the jet was retrofitted.”
If Trump hadn’t been adamant about accepting the Qatari plane, and the U.S. Air Force hadn’t rushed it into service without those advanced antimissile capabilities, none of this would have happened.
In recent days, there’s been a back-and-forth about how serious the threat to Air Force One in Ankara was. From the Wall Street Journal:
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As President Trump’s motorcade rushed through Turkey’s capital to the airport, his security team had an urgent decision to make.
U.S. and Israeli intelligence in July had uncovered a threat by Iranian proxies to launch a lightweight, shoulder-fired missile at Trump’s plane as he departed Ankara, according to U.S. and Middle East officials. In a worst-case scenario, a militant would evade tight security at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit, stand about a half-mile away from the airport, and use a man-portable air-defense system, or Manpad, to strike the jet, said officials who have seen or been briefed on the intelligence.
While the plane would later be accompanied by jet fighters in the air, according to White House aides, the aircraft would have been vulnerable as it took off under such a scenario.
Some U.S. officials thought the alleged plot was impractical, implausible, even impossible. Turkish officials would later tell regional counterparts that they found no evidence Trump was ever in danger of a Manpad attack, Middle East officials said.
block quote end
For once, spending two years of my life in Ankara, Turkey, comes in handy, although you should keep in mind my experience was nearly two decades ago. As I wrote back in 2013, after a suicide bomber detonated his explosives at an entrance to the U.S. Embassy, killing two, the city is about as safe as you’re going to find in the region:
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People used to ask me if it was dangerous, and I answered it was probably the safest city in the region — the national, political, and military capital of a NATO ally, with cops and special national police and troops of every kind all around. There was a modest U.S. military presence as well, although most of it was working at the embassy, with Turkish troops at nearby bases, or working with moving non-combat supplies through Incirlik Air Base (pronounced In-jer-lick) to Iraq.
The only attempted terror attack that I recall in the city during my time there was a suicide bomber who tried to get into the Justice Ministry. But when you saw a terror attack in Turkey, chances are it was the PKK (the Kurdistan Worker’s Party), which was fighting for a separate Kurdish state. The PKK liked to put bombs in trash cans, etc., but they mostly targeted Istanbul and the coastal beach resorts, trying to scare away the tourists. The PKK certainly wasn’t pro-American, but Americans weren’t generally the targets of their wrath — the Turks and their government were.
There was an al-Qaeda presence in the country while I was there, and periodically folks who worked at the embassy would tell me they suspected the bad guys were “probing” their defenses and attempting to conduct surveillance, looking for weaknesses, etc. But Turks made up a very small portion of al-Qaeda’s ranks; at the time, out of the several hundred al-Qaeda sitting in Guantanamo Bay, six were Turkish citizens.
block quote end
But keep in mind, Iran has full diplomatic relations with Turkey; the Iranian embassy in Ankara is right next to the Sheraton where I would pick up my copies of The Economist and the International Herald-Tribune. The Iranian regime likely has a decent intelligence network within Turkey, and so the potential threat from agents of the Iranian state is probably at least a little higher than that of a garden-variety Islamist terrorist group.
Also note that on July 16, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq announced it was offering a $10 million reward for the killing of President Trump. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq is a network of “various militias of multiple sects and backers, but it is predominately Shia militias supported by Iran.”
This morning, from the Washington Post:
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The assassination threat was relayed by the Israeli government to the CIA, where analysts did not view the intelligence as compelling and conveyed that skepticism to Trump administration officials, one of the officials said.
Another official called the reports of threats against Trump’s life “Israeli-derived, not U.S.-generated, and viewed as low confidence.”
block quote end
The problem is, the U.S. Secret Service can’t say, “Eh, it’s probably nothing” — or at least they can’t say that without taking a significant risk with their priority mission. A U.S. official told the Post, “The Secret Service has had three near misses with this president, so they’re not taking any chances. They did what they had to do.”
The new Qatari-donated Air Force One is being upgraded — “maxed out,” in the president’s words — so hopefully the difference in capabilities between the old planes and the new one will soon be erased. But there’s one particularly troubling detail, deep in the Wall Street Journal’s lengthy article on the ruse:
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Some of the president’s aides had worried about flying into Turkey in advance of the trip, particularly on the Qatari-gifted jet, which has fewer defensive capabilities. Trump didn’t share those concerns and wanted to fly the plane overseas, a senior administration official said.
block quote end
We know the president is irrationally exuberant about the plane from Qatar. Before boarding the plane July, Trump implied that the Qataris build better planes than Americans. “Frankly, we couldn’t build a plane like this because we wouldn’t be willing to spend the kind of money necessary. They spent top dollar,” the president said. Keep in mind, the Qatari-donated plane is U.S.-made, by Boeing, and was delivered to the Qatari royal family’s fleet (the Qatar Amiri Flight) in 2012.
As powerful as the president is, someone needs to be able to say “no” to him, particularly when he is making a bad decision involving his own safety.
ADDENDUM: If making fun of MyPillow CEO and unsuccessful Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Lindell after he claims that his defeat by more than 45,000 votes was the result of hacked election software strikes you as “dancing on Mike Lindell’s grave” . . . maybe I’m not the right writer for you.
