The Decoys

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, August 13, 2026

 

I’m surprised at how much attention the president’s deception at last month’s NATO summit in Turkey has gotten this week, but I shouldn’t be.

 

I’m surprised because Donald Trump engages in lots of deceptions, and few are as defensible as the one he perpetrated in Ankara. In an administration that churns out a new Watergate-tier scandal every few weeks, the president secretly switching planes to avoid a possible attack barely warrants comment.

 

According to the Washington Post, Trump boarded Air Force One to depart the summit on July 8 … and then, along with a few select aides, quietly sneaked out through a rear exit and into the container of an idling Turkish catering van. (There’s video, sort of.) He was driven across the tarmac to another U.S. military plane assigned to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and boarded surreptitiously. Both planes then flew to the United Kingdom. Upon arrival, the president sneaked back onto Air Force One and disembarked in front of the cameras to create the impression that he had been aboard the entire time.

 

Then he boarded the luxe new jet that he was gifted by the government of Qatar—aka the flying bribe—for the trip home.

 

Presidents have concealed their whereabouts from the public before for the sake of foiling terrorists, including turning Air Force One into a decoy while they flew in less conspicuous aircraft. And there was evidence of terrorism afoot in this case, it turns out. “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,” sources told the Wall Street Journal.

 

The CIA was reportedly skeptical of the plot, but two U.S. officials alleged to the New York Times that “someone in the vicinity of the NATO summit had been spotted with a shoulder-fired missile. And the Iranians knew specifically where Mr. Trump was staying in Ankara, including which floor of the building.” If the Secret Service had allowed the president to depart in Air Force One and the plane had been shot down, how would the agency possibly have justified disregarding that intelligence?

 

Its subterfuge was appropriate. At least one person aboard the decoy flight, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, evidently was aware of the threat and of the fact that the president had secretly switched planes. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was also on board and “likely aware,” an official told the Associated Press. It’s unclear whether other high-ranking passengers like advisers Stephen Miller and Steven Cheung knew the stakes, but either way, this wasn’t a case of VIPs being spared from risking their own necks while the rest of the presidential retinue was in danger.

 

There were, however, people aboard Air Force One—many, it seems—who were left in the dark about the risk. “The clandestine mission … was carried out unbeknownst to journalists and some White House staff members who believed they were on the same plane as the president,” the Washington Post reported. All were unwitting decoys. To maximize operational secrecy and better protect his own life, Trump was willing to risk theirs.

 

On the flight home from Britain, Trump spoke to reporters about potential Iranian threats to his plane without revealing the deception he’d just engaged in. “If I go, you go, right?” he half-joked about a midair disaster. “Perhaps someday you want to change professions.” But that too was a deception: If a missile had taken down Air Force One as it departed from Ankara, they would have been gone but he would not have.

 

And so you can understand why I say that I shouldn’t be surprised by how much coverage this incident has received. Not only does it involve the media’s favorite subject—i.e., the media, which was unknowingly placed in harm’s way by the leader of the free world—but it’s one of those memorable little vignettes that we get sometimes during presidencies that seem (emphasis on seem) to illuminate something essential about the occupant of the office.

 

Callousness, not cowardice.

 

The most famous example during my lifetime is Jimmy Carter’s run-in with a “killer rabbit” while vacationing back home in Georgia in 1979. That episode was promoted by Republicans as evidence that Carter was a wimp and a hapless clown; the then-president, an Annapolis grad who had specialized in nuclear technology during his military service, was neither.

 

But it jibed with the public’s sense that Carter was a weak leader overmatched by the threats America faced. And so the incident became a popular shorthand for the impotence of his administration.

 

A similar problem befell George H.W. Bush in 1992 when he had a run-in with, er, supermarket technology. During an appearance at a grocers convention in Florida, Bush was supposedly amazed to discover that items could be rung up instantaneously via a barcode scanner—or so a story in the Times alleged. Other reporters on the scene claimed they saw no such amazement and were backed up by eyewitnesses. Bush himself complained about the allegation to the Times.

 

No matter. The story conveniently corroborated the Democratic narrative that our wealthy, WASPy, patrician president could no longer relate to average Americans, who were still licking their wounds from the recession the previous year. And so the incident became a popular shorthand for Bush being “out of touch.”

 

The episode with Trump’s decoy plane strikes me as being in the same vein. It’s memorable because it confirms in an unusually vivid and succinct way something that his critics already discerned in his political persona—even though, as with Carter and Bush, reaction to it hasn’t been entirely fair.

 

For instance, some are treating the plane incident as an insight into the president’s alleged cowardice. I understand the impulse. He’s a five-time draft dodger, after all, and his endless blowhardery about “strength” and “toughness” does not sit comfortably with the image of him hiding from Iranians inside a Turkish catering van.

 

At The Atlantic, Tom Nichols went as far as to compare Trump’s behavior to that of Greg Stillson, the villainous politician whose career is ruined when he shields himself from an assassin by hiding behind a small child in Stephen King’s novel The Dead Zone. Stillson was willing to see an innocent die so that he might live; so was Trump vis-a-vis the White House press corps in Ankara, Nichols notes.

 

The problem with that analogy is that the president has already been through a Stillson-esque assassination attempt and didn’t reach for a child. On the contrary: The poise he exhibited, famously pumping his fist and shouting “fight, fight, fight!” as he bled from a wound to his ear, is now such an exalted part of the Trumpian mythos that he reportedly considered placing a replica of his fist atop the victory arch that he intends to build in Virginia.

 

After that episode, I doubt most Americans perceive cowardice as a key component of his persona. Even if they do, I don’t think taking a sensible precaution like switching planes against a terror plot is evidence of it, however amusing it might be to imagine him squeezed between racks of kebabs in the back of that truck. Prudence isn’t cowardly.

 

The Trumpian trait that the switcheroo demonstrates isn’t cowardice, it’s callous selfishness. Why weren’t the press members aboard told that the threat they faced on Air Force One was severe enough that the president and Secret Service deemed it unsafe? They were told when Bill Clinton pulled a similar switcheroo in 2000.

 

“They would have blabbed!” you might say. True—after Trump’s plane had landed safely in Britain. Reporters are willing to delay publishing information (or to withhold certain details altogether) if doing otherwise would credibly threaten national security. There’s no reason to think they would have endangered Trump deliberately by revealing his whereabouts while he was still in harm’s way. Or no good reason, I should say: If you’re the sort of populist who wears “Rope, tree, journalist: Some assembly required” T-shirts, you’ll believe anything.

 

“The press would have obliged the ground rules” of secrecy if Trump had told them about the threat, former Pentagon spokesman John Kirby assured the Wall Street Journal. “The last thing they would ever want to do is put anyone’s lives at risk, and in this case even their own. They also deserved—as did the unwitting staffers on the plane—the opportunity to make alternative travel plans. It is unconscionable that aircrew and passengers were allowed to fly in that aircraft at that particular moment, ignorant of the danger they were in.”

 

Had reporters been warned of the threat, they could have stayed behind on the ground while Air Force One took off with only the crew (and officials like Rubio, if they were willing to risk it) aboard. The decoy ruse still would have worked. The media stragglers could have flown home later commercially or on some other government plane.

 

Why they weren’t given that option is anyone’s guess, but there are three obvious possibilities, none of which reflects well on Trump. Maybe he convinced himself that they really would blab if they knew the truth and therefore they had to be deceived—even if they ended up dying en masse. Or maybe his malice toward the media is such that, if his valued deputies were obliged to face the risk of death aboard Air Force One, he wanted his enemies in the press to face it too.

 

My guess, though, is that he didn’t think about it at all. A plan was devised to protect him, and keeping it as secret as possible would maximize its chances of succeeding. That’s all he needed to know. Who cares what his safety meant for anyone else, be it Rubio, Miller, or the White House press corps?

 

Callousness, not cowardice. That’s the selfish core of Trump’s persona and that’s why this episode is illuminating and memorable.

 

What if?

 

That also makes it difficult to write about thoughtfully. There’s no truism in American politics in 2026 as self-evident as “The president is callous.” What’s left to say about it?

 

You’ll find examples literally anywhere you look. For instance, according to the Wall Street Journal, the White House has begun pressuring the Justice Department to resume prosecuting the man whom U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro recently cleared of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Trump is obviously angry that he’s been denied a scapegoat for the pool’s botched renovation and just as obviously feels no qualms about putting an innocent man through a legal ordeal if doing so will help Trump save face.

 

It’s a straight line from that mindset to putting other people’s lives in jeopardy to improve one’s own chances of departing Turkey safely.

 

Or how about what the president has done to the National Guard, which has now been deployed in Washington, D.C., for a full year and is set to remain there until the end of Trump’s term? Crime is down in the city—but crime is down in lots of American cities and was trending downward in D.C. long before the Guard arrived. According to best estimates, the military’s presence has somewhat reduced property crimes like car break-ins in the heavily trafficked tourist areas where the Guard is mostly stationed, but it’s done nothing at all to bring down the sort of violent crime in rough neighborhoods that supposedly justified the deployment in the first place.

 

All of which means that Guardsmen are spending long stretches away from their day jobs and their families to perform drudgery like picking up trash, mowing grass, and shoveling snow, all so that the president can enjoy a bit of law-and-order “dictator theater” in his backyard. Pure callousness.

 

And none of this touches on the sort of meta-callousness Trump routinely displays by obsessing over pet projects like ballrooms and monuments instead of public priorities like the cost of living.

 

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman recently recounted interviewing Trump in March, when the new war was raging, and finding him consumed by photos of maple trees he hoped to plant on the White House grounds rather than by battle plans or regional maps. One new analysis of the president’s many public statements this year found that, apart from Iran, he’s devoted more words to his construction plans than to any other subject. More than to the economy. And much, much more than to immigration.

 

The decoy incident reminded me of something that Anthony Scaramucci, who’s known Trump for years and was (very) briefly his White House communications director, said about him back in 2019. “He is so narcissistic, he doesn’t see people as people. He sees them as objects in his field of vision. And so therefore, that’s why he has no empathy,” he observed. “If you and I were in his field of vision and he had a cold and the two of us had to die for him to get a Kleenex, you’re f—ing dead.”

 

If a bunch of unwitting decoys on Air Force One had to die for him to leave Turkey safely, they were f—ing dead.

 

We’re left with this question: What if they had died? What if the plane had been shot down, killing everyone aboard, and Trump had been forced to explain why he didn’t warn them before they took off?

 

Why did Trump’s closest cronies, like Dan Scavino and Natalie “The Human Printer” Harp, get to abscond with him in the catering truck and secretly board Hegseth’s plane while others weren’t so lucky? Harp was Trump’s “first pick” to join him in his aerial lifeboat, a source told the Daily Mail. Why not Miller, a father of four children whose latest is 2 months old?

 

My guess is that the president would have glibly answered the criticism with something along the lines of what he told reporters on the flight home from Britain: Perhaps they all should have changed professions.

 

Back in 2015, when he first ran for office, Trump was asked about his affinity for Vladimir Putin by Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough. How can you respect someone “that kills journalists that don’t agree with him,” Scarborough wondered. “Well, I think that our country does plenty of killing, too, Joe,” an unfazed Trump replied.

 

He may have tried to minimize an Air Force One shootdown with similar deflections. Journalists die all the time. They pride themselves on taking dangerous risks to get a story, don’t they? Would it have been better if I had died on the plane with them? Why aren’t we talking about the late, great Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller?

 

None of which would explain why he didn’t give the passengers the courtesy of a heads-up and the option to stay behind.

 

Even so, and needless to say, he would receive the full-throated support of his party in spinning the incident. Amid the inevitable calls for a full ground invasion of Iran to “avenge Marco,” Republican politicians would feel obliged by a faint sense of decorum to pay lip service to the reporters who were sent to their deaths. But much of the “rope, tree, journalist” postliberal base would openly celebrate the media bloodletting, treating it as a silver lining in a tragedy that had taken immortal American hero Stephen Miller far too young.

 

And from top to bottom, all arms of the party would agree that the president’s survival was further proof of his ordination by God to lead America for as long as possible.

 

Before long, the “Trump hid the threat of a terrorist attack from its victims to protect himself” story would become just one more scandal that divides neatly along partisan lines before being ushered out of the news by some new Watergate-tier travesty. Within a few weeks, hardly anyone would remember it.

 

The thing about callousness is that you get used to it. And once you get used to it, you barely notice it at all.