Don't Fly with Me

 There has been much debate over the President’s unorthodox departure from Turkey efter the NATO summit in July. For security reasons, it was decided that he not fly on his Qatari-gift jumbo jet, so another plane, fitted for Air Force One use, was provided. He was seen to board that plane, which also contained the White House press corps, two cabinet secretaries, and others. But then, he was secretly escorted to an airport catering truck and whisked off to a separate military aircraft - all of this due to a credible threat from Iran.

A clever idea - except for the fact that the press corps knew nothing about this until the details came out weeks later in the Washington Post. Many cable news pundits were outraged that the supposed Air Force One plane was a “decoy” and that all those aboard it were therefore “expendable” in the event of an Iranian attack.

I’m not quite as indignant about this. There was secrecy, because if you share information, it’s not a secret anymore. Second, if you’re going to fly anywhere, there’s probably nothing safer than a trip on Air Force One. The planes used for it have a full suite of defenseive measures that can be deployed if an attack occurs, so those aboard in this case were not completelysitting ducks.

OK, if the plane was so safe, you might ask, why couldn’t Mr. Trump fly on it with everyone else? The Secret Service, whose goal is to protect the President, reportedly decided on the plane swap. Later, after both the President’s plane and the one with the press corps had landed safely in England, it’s reported that Mr. Trump secretly got back on the press corps plane.

If there’s a problem here, it’s not the plane swap but the lack of transparency about it. Why couldn’t at least something have been shared with reporters after everyone returned home? Why did we have to learn about it a month later, and from the Washington Post?

This whole thing reads like a spy thriller. But it’s reasonable to assume that the threat level against the President was indeed high, given the NATO summit location and, of course, the fact that we had just bombed the stuffing out of Iran. That said, I do think here are bigger fish to fry right now, especially with the mid-term elections approaching, than getting too wrought up about the catering truck caper. The “could have beens” just didn’t happen, and we can at least be grateful for that.