NEW ARRIVALS: Press and staff stayed on the plane...

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12, 2026  

...after the president left: Crouched behind barrels of chicken salad, he made his way out of Turkey!

It was the Washington Post which broke the story. The Post's report starts like this: 

Contradicting public statements, Trump took secret flight from Turkey amid Iranian threat

An Iranian assassination threat against President Donald Trump prompted an extraordinary operation last month in which he flew secretly from Turkey on an alternate military aircraft while the White House said he was aboard Air Force One, The Washington Post has learned.

The clandestine mission, which has not been reported previously, was carried out unbeknownst to journalists and some White House staff members who believed they were on the same plane as the president, according to material reviewed by The Post, a U.S. official familiar with the operation and another person with knowledge of the president’s travel. These people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the matter.  

[...]   

In Ankara, Trump boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras. He was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane—an Air Force C-32A—via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight, according to the U.S. official and corroborating material reviewed by The Post. That made Air Force One a “decoy” with media and some White House staff aboard, the official said.   

The catering truck took the sitting president to the smaller C-32A. Flying out of Turkey on Air Force One was deemed too dangerous for the president, though media and some White House staff were left aboard the doomed plane.   

We were puzzled by the ethics of this procedure. Last night, someone finally asked about that, as Mediaite reports:  

REPORTER (8/11/26): Why was it too dangerous for you to fly on Air Force One, but not too dangerous for the press?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, I don’t know. I think, actually, the plane that I flew on was at greater risk. I think it was at greater risk.

REPORTER: Why do you say that? 

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Because that would be the plane, I think, that they would be more likely to go for.  

You're right! The reporter asked a good question, but she got a ridiculous answer. 

(To see C-Span's unedited tape of the full exchange, you can just click this.)

At first glance, the arrangement here was quite strange. It was decided that the president couldn't leave on Air Force One due to the possibility that the plane would be attacked. But the press was allowed to leave on that plane—and no, they apparently weren't informed that they were presumably in danger.   

We were surprised to think that some such arrangement had actually taken place. We've also been surprised by the way cable discussions have tended to skip right past this apparent moral dilemma.  

Those were our initial reactions to this unusual event. But when we read the Post's report, we ran headfirst into this:   

To transport the president out of Turkey, U.S. officials relied in part on a technique that has occasionally become public knowledge. One such mission occurred in March 2000, when President Bill Clinton visited Pakistan. With television cameras recording in Islamabad, Clinton disembarked from a plain white jet that followed the blue-and-white Air Force One, clarifying where he had been.

There have been other times in the last 30 years when Air Force One served as a decoy for the president because of a serious threat or because he was flying to a dangerous location, another U.S. official said, declining to elaborate. [Air Force One] is highly secure, but also highly visible, so putting the president on an alternate plane instead can be considered safer, that former official said.   

"Considerably safer" for him, but not for the staff and the press!

Rather plainly, that passage seems to suggest that this sort of thing has been done in the past. Does that perhaps explain the silence of the journalists? 

Is it possible that news orgs have agreed to have their employees exposed to danger in this way? Is it possible that they don't want their employees to talk about this ongoing arrangement? 

Whatever the truth may turn out to be, the madness of the age is all around us today. We don't know of any reason to assume that a modern nation can survive this degree of tribal madness—the tribal madness referred to at the start of Kurt Andersen's guest essay for the New York Times:

Has America Already Undergone a Soft Breakup?

“I actually think,” Rush Limbaugh told his many millions of listeners during the weeks between Donald Trump losing the 2020 election and his supporters’ assault on the Capitol, “that we’re trending toward secession. It can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs.”    

Twenty months later, on the day the F.B.I. seized thousands of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, The Times reported that “posts on Twitter that mentioned ‘civil war’ had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours" and “jumped again a few weeks later...

As we noted in Monday's report, that's the way the essay starts. We think it gets a bit unrealistic from there.

In our view, Madness Red is everywhere, as we've endlessly noted. And as we'll note tomorrow, we're also dealing with the rising tide of something which could even be seen as Madness-Adjacent Blue. 

Can things really "go on this way?" We can't say the answer is obvious. At any rate, for today, we'll leave you with these stone-cold basic questions:

While the president fled on the C-32, were journalists and White House staff subjected to significant danger?

Will news orgs choose to explore the question that one reporter asked?   

Also, was this troubling procedure a "new arrival?" Or has it been here all along? 

Tomorrow: Who is [NAME WITHHELD]?