Why the elaborate ruse Trump used in Turkey isn’t like other secret presidential trips

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 snaked 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 White House hasn’t denied reports,
but also isn’t providing details

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.

Past presidents put themselves in dangerous areas

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.

Officials have gone to great lengths to keep presidents safe on covert trips before.

In 2023, a motorcade pulled away from the White House around 3:30 a.m. on a Sunday, and President Joe Biden later boarded an Air Force C-32, a modified Boeing 757 normally used for domestic trips to smaller airports, and flew to Poland. Biden then took a secret, 10-hour overnight train ride to Kyiv meant to show solidarity with Ukraine after Russia’s invasion.

A press pool at the White House had been expecting a quiet Sunday for Biden in Washington. However, two journalists went to Ukraine with him and documented the trip, capturing images of Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy striding past a memorial to fallen soldiers in Ukraine’s capital as air raid sirens sounded.

In Trump’s first term, he made a secret trip to Afghanistan on Thanksgiving Day in 2019, when officials kept a separate press pool and decoy plane in Florida to maintain the illusion that the president was spending the holiday at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Instead, Trump and another group of reporters flew to the sprawling U.S. military base at Bagram, where the president spent more than three hours on the ground serving turkey to troops, giving a speech and meeting with Afghanistan’s then-president, Ashraf Ghani, while journalists documented what was occurring.

When President George W. Bush made his first trip to Iraq in 2003, news was not released until he was in the air on the way back to the United States. President Barack Obama made a furtive nighttime visit to Afghanistan in 2010, when he was meant to be spending the weekend at Camp David. Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon visited war zones in Vietnam.

Other risky trips featured presidential subterfuge

President Bill Clinton went secretly from India to Pakistan in 2000, attempting to calm tensions in the disputed Kashmir region. He was seen talking with officials in front of a military plane that he appeared to board. Instead, Clinton ducked around the front of the aircraft to another jet parked nearby.

Both planes took off for Islamabad, as did a third jet painted with the familiar baby blue markings of Air Force One.

Joe Lockhart, a White House press secretary for Clinton, noted that reporters knew the president was on one of the planes, “but not which one.” He said he and other officials had briefed the press pool ahead of time and “although they didn’t know all the details, it was made clear” that Clinton “was not going to travel on the plane they were on.

“There was no attempt to hide anything, much less lie about it later,” Lockhart wrote on social media.

Bush was visiting an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, during the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, and, after all commercial air traffic was grounded, officials wanted to move him to an undisclosed location.

The full White House traveling press pool flew with Bush from Florida to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where officials reduced the number of reporters and staff on the plane. Bush and the smaller traveling party next flew to Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base before eventually returning to Washington.

Bush’s location remained secret throughout the day. However, the White House did not suggest that the president was somewhere he was not — unlike when Trump was whisked out of Turkey.

“You can imagine the different ways that this could have gone wrong, where, for a period of time, no one would have been able to independently corroborate the status of the U.S. president, or who was in charge of the U.S. government,” Graff said. “And that’s an incredibly dangerous moment for the world.”