Colby Cosh: Trump’s airplane shell game raises serious concerns

U.S. President Donald Trump boards Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Aug. 11. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

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Sometimes I am just awestruck at the glorious feast future historians will have as they try to decipher White House decision-making from the time of U.S. President Donald Trump. On Wednesday, the U.S. newspapers were full of amazement at the weird series of events that happened on the tarmac at Ankara Esenboga Airport in Turkey on July 8. Shortly before departing a NATO summit in the Turkish capital, the president announced that he would be flying out to the United Kingdom on the old Air Force One (a VC-25, i.e., a modified Boeing 747) instead of the new Qatari gift plane (a 747-8) that has just come into occasional use.

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He muttered that he was using the older aircraft for “old time’s sake,” eventually boarded it … and was secretly hustled into a catering truck that transferred him to a third aircraft, a U.S. Air Force Boeing C-32A. It was this tricked-out 757 that ended up taking Trump, along with Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, to Britain.

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Reports suggest that U.S. intelligence officials were concerned about an Iranian missile attack on the old Air Force One, but that didn’t stop the older plane from taking off, effectively serving as a decoy, with other cabinet secretaries, dozens of reporters and plenty of executive-branch staff members aboard. When the president was asked how he could expose those people to a danger he avoided, he claimed that, “The (third) plane I flew on was at greater risk,” which raises the question why he (and the military-intelligence establishment) bothered with the little switcheroo at all.

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The aircraft shell game induced a lot of chuckles on social media as people imagined Trump being shuffled between planes inside a drinks cart. But, as the national-security historian Garrett Graff observed in an article published on Wednesday, the incident raises several questions of high seriousness.

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Why was the Qatari plane avoided in the first place? The answer seems to be, “It’s not yet actually fit for the purpose of secure presidential travel,” although Trump has already flown on it in safer regions. And why was the press corps not told of Trump’s switch? In the past, Graff notes, the media has sometimes been misled by the Secret Service for security purposes, but at least a few trusted reporters were always kept up to date on the president’s whereabouts. This has heavy implications: Trump was, for a while, aboard a mystery plane over foreign soil, with the secretary of defence, and almost nobody knew a thing about it.

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Was the nuclear chain of command back in the U.S. fully aware of the switch, and of the use of the old Air Force One as a decoy? Graff reminds us of a fresh outrage that got lost amid the unending chaos and the endless stream of nonsensical Trumpian verbiage last month: the president posted a message on his Truth Social site suggesting that he had given “orders” for Iran to be destroyed by “1000 missiles” in the event of his assassination. Whether or not such a “dead man’s switch” is a good idea strategically — and let’s face it: the person of the president is protected internationally by the implied threat of overwhelming retaliation — it is plainly illegal. Nuclear and other military command responsibilities would devolve upon the vice-president, along with the presidency itself, the moment the president was dead. Assuming, of course, anybody knew he was dead.

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