cloak-and-dagger departure from Ankara, Turkey, last month â secretly slipping off the plane he was seen boarding â was an extraordinary security maneuver, but the playbook for disguising his movements aboard Air Force One dates back years.
Trump himself has long talked about the brilliance of the bait-and-switching during his first term.
Trump’s Dec. 26, 2018, surprise Christmas trip to U.S. troops in Iraq featured a darkened Air Force One, closed window shades and an unusual military call sign intended to obscure the presidential jet’s movement. That operation was ultimately pierced by a British plane spotter, however, prompting the White House to go considerably further the following year by leaving one presidential 747 parked conspicuously in Florida while Trump secretly flew another to Afghanistan.
The history gives fresh context to reports this week detailing an even more elaborate deception July 8, when Trump left a NATO summit in Ankara amid what U.S. officials described as a credible Iranian threat against the president or his aircraft.
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Trump publicly boarded the legacy blue-and-white Air Force One before secretly exiting through another door into an airport catering truck and transferring to an Air Force C-32A, a modified Boeing 757, according to reports.
The larger presidential jet then departed with journalists and some White House staff aboard, with the assumption that Trump was traveling with them.
“Well, it’s only up to the Secret Service; I just follow what they’d like to do,” Trump told reporters Tuesday night after traveling to Geneva, Ohio, for the Freedom 250 Patriot Games. “So I go by the Secret Service and the military.
“They wanted me to go on a different flight, a different plane, equal safety â but they wanted me to do it, so I do it. I do what they say.”
While the call sign Air Force One (AF1) changes to wherever the president is purportedly traveling, the decoy operations are a shell game to keep U.S. enemies in the dark.
The July 8 legacy 747 used the “AF1” call sign in flight despite Trump actually traveling aboard the C-32A under the comparatively nondescript “RCH18” designation, according to reported flight-tracking data.
Reporters were instructed to keep their window shades closed â a detail that harkens back to Trump’s regaling campaign rally crowds about the Christmas night 2018 Iraq trip and another November 2019 surprise trek to have Thanksgiving dinner with troops in Afghanistan.
Those trips have a common destination: travel through foreign and potentially hostile airspace.
Trump himself helped set the cover story last month.
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Before leaving Ankara, he announced that he would use the “former Air Force One” for part of the trip home “for old times sake,” while the newer Boeing 747-8 provided by Q
