The infinite depths of Trump’s fear and loathing.
Aug 24, 2026
What do you call a president who puts two hundred fellow citizens at grave risk to save his own skin? Cynical. Immoral. Brutally pragmatic. Gutless. Or you could just call him Donald Trump, doing what comes naturally.
Here is what happened a few weeks ago, in case you’ve forgotten amid the maelstrom of grim news.
On July 7, Trump flew into the NATO summit in Ankara on the new Air Force One, the jet gifted by Qatar and hastily retrofitted for presidential use. That’s the plane U.S. security reporting had already flagged as inadequately hardened against a missile strike or cyber sabotage.
The next day, as the summit wrapped up, the president announced he’d take the old Air Force One home instead, “for old time’s sake.”
Press photographers caught him climbing its stairs, waving, and going inside. He never flew on it.
Minutes later, acting on intelligence about an Iranian plot involving a shoulder-fired missile, security officials smuggled him off that plane through catering truck and onto a separate military jet.
The old plane flew on to England without him, carrying the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, senior staff, and the full traveling press pool. The reporters assumed the president was still aboard, having been ordered to draw their blinds during his secret exit before takeoff.
Once the group reached the U.K., Trump switched from the military aircraft to the Qatari-donated 747, the new and shiny Air Force One, for the final leg home.
The White House kept the earlier switcheroo secret for more than a month, until The Washington Post broke the story in mid-August. Only then did the journalists who’d flown that first leg learn they’d been potential sacrificial lambs, consigned to an aircraft Iran had targeted, according to intelligence reporting.
Decoys do have a history
To be sure, Trump didn’t invent the decoy-plane idea. What sets the Ankara episode apart is not the tactic. It’s what Trump did to the people left holding the bag.
The deception deftly routed the danger away from the president himself and onto a bunch of folks, mostly journalists (Trump’s least favorite people next to just about everybody else), who had no idea they were in the immediate, palpable crosshairs.
For perspective, Bill Clinton used a decoy flying into Pakistan in 2000, when threats tied to his Kashmir policy put him at risk. A marked jet touched down in front of the cameras. A Secret Service look-alike stepped off. Clinton himself came down the stairs of an unmarked plane parked elsewhere on the tarmac.
But some in the press corps knew. White House officials briefed Susan Page secretly before the flight about the decoy gambit and told her the dangers applied to the journalists too.
Obama’s secret 2010 trip to Bagram followed a similar trajectory. Reporters traveling with him flew into Afghanistan in the dark alongside him. They were part of the secret, not left behind or shunted onto a potential martyr’s flight as carefully contrived cover for it.
Two years ago, Trump ran a version of the decoy-flight gambit that eerily anticipated Ankara.
After the September 2024 assassination attempt at his Florida golf course, amid intelligence about Iranian retaliation threats, Trump’s security detail flew him to a campaign event on a plane owned by his friend Steve Witkoff instead of his own jet, in an operation staff nicknamed the “Ghost Flight.”
Campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita and the rest of the staff flew, unaware, on Trump Force One. Staffers who later learned they’d been flying without him worried they’d served as potential bait, though campaign leaders insisted they weren’t. One campaign official called it a test run for the future. Judged against Ankara, that test appears to have been passed.
At least one member of Clinton’s press corps knew the shape of the deception in Pakistan. Obama shared with his press contingent the danger that followed them into Bagram. Trump’s press corps on the Ankara run didn’t know anything, then or for the five weeks after.
Peter Baker of The New York Times, who was aboard the decoy aircraft, later rendered a judgment that should have stopped the ethical debate cold, in Trump’s disfavor. If Iran really was trying to shoot down the presidential 747, Baker observed, the subterfuge designed to protect Trump likely made targets of everyone on that plane, most of whom had no idea he wasn’t with them.
Baker’s proposed remedy, in retrospect: why not ground the plane instead of flying it, at least until Trump had cleared the danger zone, and then either announce he was gone so the original aircraft stopped looking like a target, or send the passengers home some other way?
Nothing about the ruse required keeping a planeload of unwitting people in the sky as bait for a shooter tracking the president.
It can be argued in Trump’s defense that a grounded plane, or one visibly emptied of staff before takeoff, might have tipped off the very people watching for his departure and blown the deception’s cover in the process.
Moreover, the old Air Force One did fly to England with a fighter jet escort. Administration officials have cited this as proof the plane wasn’t sent up naked.
Reasonable protective doctrine can defend flying a decoy with armed cover.
What no doctrine defends is flying it dark, telling nobody outside the president’s innermost circle why the shades had to stay down, and sitting on the whole story for five weeks.
Intel goof
There’s also a prior-track-record problem the administration hasn’t addressed. The warnings that prompted use of the decoy came from Israeli intelligence, the same source that had grievously misled Trump weeks earlier, convincing him an American strike on Iran would trigger a popular uprising against the regime.
That didn’t happen, and Trump, along with the rest of us, is still paying for the error.
Why not a little more skepticism this time around?
In fact, there was some. Reuters has reported that U.S. intelligence agencies could not independently verify the Israeli warnings behind the Turkey threat, and a Turkish official told Reuters that his spies had no corroborating evidence either.
A principled decision maker doesn’t put third parties at risk like that, certainly not without giving them a say, and certainly not on the say-so of a source with a track record like this one’s.
Accidentally, in harm’s way
Look, I get it that protecting the presidency, and the actual incumbent, can sometimes mean accepting collateral damage to innocent bystanders.
Proximity to this president carries risks, and reporters who cover him know their safety comes second to his.
Fair enough, as far as it goes.
But Ankara was not about exposing unlucky bystanders to stray rounds in a chaotic moment. Someone up top decided that keeping the ruse airtight was worth flying two hundred people through hostile airspace as bait, without telling them.
Rubio and the plane’s other cabinet-level passengers likely knew what they were risking. The rest did not. That distinction is the whole ballgame, and it’s why Peter Baker’s observations deserve a response that nobody in this White House has bothered to give.
The silence is deafening, the cynicism striking, and as an American who has watched Trump with deepening misgivings about his mental and moral state, I can’t help but wonder if this episode isn’t somehow diagnostic, a totemic reflection of the man’s deeper hostility toward the press and his ever more apparent indifference to anyone’s welfare but his own.
I know that’s a lot to read into one discrete episode with its own particular facts. Still, the larger inference is hard to put aside, especially since the hits keep coming on so many fronts.
The broadening pattern
Ask yourself how surprising it is to find Trump associated, once again, with potential violence against journalists. The record is writ large in his own words and deeds.
A few reminders:
At a November 2024 rally, gesturing at the press pen and complaining about the lack of bulletproof glass around him, Trump said an attacker would have to shoot through “the fake news” to reach him. Then he said he wouldn’t mind that so much.
At a Las Vegas rally the same year, surveying the reporters covering him, he told the crowd they “sort of have a death wish.”
These weren’t private grumblings. They were delivered from a podium about people standing in a fenced pen a few dozen feet away.
Words like that don’t stay words forever. In 2019, a Trump supporter at an El Paso rally shoved a BBC cameraman from behind hard enough to nearly knock him down twice, prompting the White House Correspondents’ Association to ask Trump to tell his own supporters that violence against reporters is unacceptable. Imagine having to ask.
Layer onto that the way Trump talks to individual journalists, especially women. “Quiet, quiet piggy,” he told a Bloomberg reporter pressing him on the Epstein files, aboard Air Force One.
He called a New York Times reporter “ugly, both inside and out” over a story about his health, without a word about her male co-byline.
Maggie Haberman, who has taken this treatment herself for years, says the attacks have gotten meaner and more frequent in his second term. That’s not spin. That’s the reporter’s own read on the trend line.
Then it stopped being just words and insults. It became legal payback.
Since January 2026, the Justice Department has subpoenaed at least ten journalists at the Times and the Journal, federal agents delivering some of those subpoenas to reporters’ own homes.
A Washington Post reporter faced something even more intrusive: FBI agents searched her home under a warrant and seized her phone, laptops, and watch.
Several of the subpoenas directed at Times staffers targeted their coverage of the Qatari-donated Air Force One jet, the same plane whose disputed security record shaped the decision to keep Trump off it on the flight home.
The Department didn’t stop at the journalists. It went after phone records belonging to their relatives, including a reporter’s mother, hunting for sources.
The Times called it bad faith, noting some of the records demanded predated the stories in question by months, which suggested the government wasn’t investigating a leak so much as fishing through a newsroom’s entire network of contacts.
This was possible because Attorney General Pam Bondi had reversed a Biden-era policy that shielded journalists from exactly this kind of seizure.
The Department eventually backed off the subpoenas tied to the Qatari jet story. Facing a federal judge who threatened to quash them outright, DOJ lawyers withdrew them on July 23. But an official spokesperson made clear the retreat was tactical, not principled: the leak investigation, the department said, “remains ongoing.” The chill had already done its work.
Mull that sequence over for a second. On July 8, Trump ducks the new presidential jet on the flight home from Turkey, judging it too vulnerable to a threatened Iranian attack — and leaves the press pool to travel on the decoy instead. Days later, reporters who’d exposed those same security gaps are facing grand jury subpoenas and surveillance of their families’ phone records. The hostility and the endangerment aren’t two separate stories. They’re the same story, told from two different rooms in the same White House.
Now it’s you and me
Widen the lens further and even the American people at large start to fit Trump’s definition of acceptable collateral damage.
In June 2020, with protesters in the streets after George Floyd’s murder, Trump reportedly turned to his own Joint Chiefs chairman and asked whether troops could just shoot them in the legs. His defense secretary at the time, Mark Esper, told the story in his own memoir.
Only the objections of his own military leadership, and General Milley pointing to a portrait of Lincoln and telling him this was a protest and not an insurrection, kept the Insurrection Act off the table that summer.
Six months later, watching his own supporters storm the Capitol and beat police officers with flagpoles, Trump found different language. He called it “a day of love.”
It came back around. In September 2025, at Quantico, Trump gathered nearly every general and admiral in the American military and told them the country was under invasion from a force within, no different from a foreign enemy except that this one doesn’t wear a uniform.
He told troops confronted by protesters to get out of their vehicles and do whatever they wanted. He proposed using American cities as military training grounds.
It isn’t only people he casts as enemies who get this treatment. It’s everyone standing between him and whatever he wants at the moment.
None of that has anything to do with the decoy flight, strictly speaking. But it reveals the same governing instinct that shows up there.
When Trump’s own priorities are at stake, whether their focus is “order” in American streets, the federal budget, or his own physical safety in a danger zone, the welfare and standing of the Americans caught in the operation come last.
Protesters get cast as an enemy from within, worth hounding by American troops and, in Minneapolis, worth killing by ICE agents. Reporters get slimed as purveyors of fake news, worth a shrug after dodging an assassin’s attack at the Correspondents’ Dinner, worth a subpoena and a rummage through their phone records if their reporting proves inconvenient.
And when nearly two hundred people wound up serving as a potential Iranian target on July 8, nobody in charge thought the vast majority, including the journalists, deserved to know the truth in real time.
I’d like to believe there’s a limit to how far all this goes, some line even this president wouldn’t cross if the stakes were his own skin against a plane full of fellow Americans.
Given the record, before Ankara and since, I’m not sure “soul” is a word that applies to Donald Trump with a straight face. But if it does, the Ankara flight is as good a place as any to go looking for it.
Good luck finding it.