President Trump slipped out of Turkey in a catering truck and a military aircraft last month to evade an Iranian threat, leaving the White House press pool aboard a decoy plane — and the press ecosystem spent the week chuckling at Obama's joke about gold curtains.
The Washington Post revealed Monday that Trump's July 8 departure from a NATO summit involved an elaborate ruse: the president boarded Air Force One in full view of cameras, then slipped into a catering truck and transferred to a C-32 military aircraft, according to NBC News. The press pool, White House officials, and support staff flew on the older Air Force One as a decoy, unaware they weren't traveling with the president. NBC further reported that Trump later reboarded the older jet and then crossed the tarmac to the newer Qatari-donated plane — which, NBC noted, "lacks certain security measures and will soon be further retrofitted."
The flight was prompted by what NBC described as "security fears from the war with neighboring Iran." White House communications director Steven Cheung didn't dispute the Post's story. "The new Air Force One is a state-of-the-art aircraft that has been fitted with high-level security protocols that ensure the safety of the President and his staff," Cheung said. "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."
The White House Correspondents' Association is now pressing the administration for new protocols. Fox News anchor Jacqui Heinrich, the group's president, met with White House aides Tuesday. She wrote in a memo that she "advocated strongly for the importance of maintaining independent press coverage of the president and an accurate historical record of his movements," according to CNN, while acknowledging that "genuine security threats can require extraordinary measures."
Senate Democrats want briefings. "The Senate should be immediately briefed on the Iranian threats against the President, the extraordinary measures taken to get him out of Turkey, any risks posed to U.S. personnel, and any threat to the homeland," Schumer said, calling it "unacceptable that Congress was kept in the dark." Senator Richard Blumenthal called the undisclosed travels "downright scary" and asked what precautions were taken for staff and reporters on the decoy plane — a fair question, given that if the aircraft was too dangerous for the president, others were still aboard.
TIME and the AJC both noted that previous presidents have taken secret trips for security reasons, but framed this operation as unusually elaborate. In past classified trips, the press pool was typically briefed ahead or informed shortly after.
Meanwhile, Obama was doing an HBO cameo. In a teaser for "Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness," the 44th president toured a replica of his old Oval Office and quipped: "I do want to point out there's no gold sign on the outside that says 'Oval Office.'" HuffPost covered the gag enthusiastically, noting Trump's "ostentatious gold ornaments" and controversial renovations — including demolishing the East Wing and paving the Rose Garden — but had nothing to say about the Iranian threat that sent a sitting president into a catering truck, or the pallets of cash the Obama administration shipped to Tehran.
HuffPost framed the Obama clip as a lighthearted dunk. The four outlets covering the Turkey flight framed it as either a press access crisis or a security necessity. Nobody connected the two — that the Iranian regime the last administration paid is now the one hunting this president.
A federal appeals court has also halted Trump's above-ground White House construction, HuffPost noted, and the president says he'll take the fight to the Supreme Court.
If Iran is dangerous enough that the president of the United States has to hide in a catering container to escape a NATO summit, what's the state of this war, and what's the exit strategy?
