President Donald Trump endangered the lives of the White House press corps after the NATO summit in Turkey last month when administration officials allegedly lied about how Trump was planning to leave the country.
The president’s whole story about flying from Turkey to England aboard an older yet more secure Air Force One jet was just a smokescreen, which unraveled in spectacular fashion when video footage of how Trump really traveled to England surfaced, according to reporting from The Washington Post and New York Times.
Video of the older, baby-blue version of Air Force One in Ankara shows catering containers used to transport meals on the opposite side of the plane from where the president and reporters boarded.
The president flew into Turkey on July 7 for the summit in Ankara on July 8 aboard his new Air Force One luxury Boeing 747, a gift from Qatar’s royal family in 2025.
Trump used the luxury jet from Qatar for the first time to travel to the summit after spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars upgrading security on the jet.
But after the summit, The New York Times reported, supposed threats from Iran and security concerns about the new plane caused Trump to switch back to an older model of Air Force One with better security upgrades for a trip to Mildenhall Air Base in England before Trump’s return to the U.S.
At the time, Trump officials said the president wanted U.S. troops in England to see the new Air Force One before he took it home.
But it turns out, while Trump boarded the older Air Force One in Ankara as usual with reporters in tow, he secretly left the plane via a catering container and boarded a waiting military jet, leaving the press and some administration staffers to travel aboard the potential Iranian target, the news outlets reported.
Once in England, the administration engaged in another astonishing ruse to return Trump to Air Force One so that it appeared that’s how he had flown to the United Kingdom and from which he deplaned as usual.
“Mr Trump was brought by vehicle from the third plane that he had arrived on to the older Air Force One, boarded it through a different entrance and strode down the step from the upper left-side door as he would typically do, according to [a] US official,” The New York Times reported.
Trump then returned to the U.S. aboard the Qatari luxury jet.
Social media exploded in outrage and fury over Trump and his administration’s duplicitousness.
“So Trump and the White House lied about which plane Trump was on flying out of Turkey, setting up journalists who thought they were on the same plane as the president to possibly be the target of an Iranian attack while he secretly departed on a different one. Words fail,” journalist Aaron Rupar noted in a post on Threads.
This commenter voiced serious anger over Trump’s astonishing secret plane switch.
“The word ‘deplorable’ doesn’t begin to describe this miserable excuse of a human.”
Threads user Gary Stweart wondered, “So they were expecting the whole plane to blow up and take all the media with it. What a prick.”
Reporters asked the White House on Monday about the secret flight from Turkey to England.
Communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement, according to The Guardian, that the Qatari jet “has been fitted with high-level security protocols that ensure the safety of the president and his staff.”
“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,” he said.
In addition to all the taxpayer money Trump spent to upgrade the Qatari luxury jet, he has said he plans to take it with him when he leaves the White House in 2029 for a display at his future Miami-based presidential library. Critics, though, believe he plans to keep it for his own personal use when his presidency ends.
