Trump says Secret Service and the military wanted him off Air Force One
in Turkey due to threat
[August 12, 2026]
By WILL WEISSERT
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he slipped
away from Air Force One after a trip last month in Turkey because the
Secret Service and military wanted him on a “different plane” due to a
threat that he insisted didn't scare him.
Trump downplayed the extraordinary nature of the subterfuge involved in
his flight, which saw him stow away in an airport catering container to
sneak onto another plane while Air Force One was sent into the sky,
essentially as a decoy.
He also downplayed the risk to the people — White House officials,
security and support staff, and reporters — he left on the plane.
“They wanted me to go on a different flight, different plane," Trump
told reporters after returning from an event in Ohio, saying he had
little choice in the matter.
“I guess there was a threat out there. I didn't really ask too much
about it,” he said. “I get a lot of threats.”
His comments confirmed a report that first appeared in The Washington
Post saying that Trump, following a NATO summit last month, was spirited
onto a different plane because of a credible threat from Iran. The
action was kept secret for weeks, until the newspaper's story.
“I think actually the plane that I flew on was at greater risk," Trump
said Tuesday, who did not provide many details about the action. But he
said the incident did not scare him.
“I don’t worry about anything, to be honest," Trump said. "Whatever it
is. You know my attitude? Whatever!”
Presidents often take secret trips — but not like this
Commanders in chief have sometimes kept overseas trips covert for
security reasons, with schedules and logistics kept classified until
after for safety reasons. But the fact that Trump’s whereabouts were
concealed at the time and for weeks afterward is believed to be
unprecedented.
“We have absolutely seen the president fly on unmarked or decoy planes
before, into Iraq, Afghanistan, other war-zone-like places,” said
Garrett M. Graff, author of “Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S.
Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die.”
“But this was an ongoing secret that I don’t think we’ve ever seen
before.”
After hiding in the catering vehicle and being moved to the other plane,
Trump stopped in Britain, sneaked back aboard the presidential plane
undetected, and even later scoffed when asked about potential danger.
“If I go, you go. Right?” he told reporters then — gliding past the fact
that if the plane had been shot down, the president wouldn't have been
aboard.
Many details about what happened remain unknown
The president's flight out of Turkey made headlines at the time because
he had arrived aboard a luxury jet gifted by Qatar, which was not
equipped with some of the same missile detection and countermeasure
systems found on older presidential jets.
Trump ended up traveling in a smaller government aircraft from Turkey to
the United Kingdom, only to secretly reboard the decoy jet, then descend
from it and climb back aboard the Qatari plane.
Presidents have regularly tested the confines of their office, pushing
their security advisers to visit war zones as a show of American
presence and their own leadership. Usually, this happens in the form of
trips that aren't announced until the president is deemed to be out of
harm's way.
What’s different this time is that Trump was covertly separated from the
rest of his travelers — including the press pool meant to provide
independent coverage of the president and his actions — and, instead of
informing the public about what occurred once the risk had passed, the
White House still hasn't fully revealed what took place.
Graff said the presence of the White House press corps is as much about
protecting “the presidency and democracy” as it is about covering the
story.
“This shows that the White House just fundamentally doesn’t understand
how important that role is,” he said.
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A catering truck is parked at Air Force One on the tarmac as the
motorcade carrying U.S. President Donald Trump arrives to depart
following the NATO summit at Ankara International Airport in Ankara,
Turkey, Wednesday, July 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Officials have gone to great lengths to keep presidents safe on
covert trips before
In 2023, a motorcade pulled away from the White House around 3:30
a.m. on a Sunday, and President Joe Biden later boarded an Air Force
C-32, a modified Boeing 757 normally used for domestic trips to
smaller airports, and flew to Poland. Biden then took a secret,
10-hour overnight train ride to Kyiv meant to show solidarity with
Ukraine after Russia’s invasion.
A press pool at the White House had been expecting a quiet Sunday
for Biden in Washington. However, two journalists went to Ukraine
with him and documented the trip, capturing images of Biden and
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy walking together.
In Trump's first term, he made a secret Thanksgiving trip to
Afghanistan in 2019, when officials kept a separate press pool and
decoy plane in Florida to maintain the illusion that the president
was spending the holiday at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Instead, Trump and another group of reporters flew to the U.S.
military base at Bagram, where the president served turkey to
troops, gave a speech and met with Afghanistan's then-president,
Ashraf Ghani, while journalists documented what was occurring.
When President George W. Bush made his first trip to Iraq in 2003,
news was not released until he was in the air on the way back to the
United States. President Barack Obama made a furtive nighttime visit
to Afghanistan in 2010, when he was meant to be spending the weekend
at Camp David.
Other risky trips featured presidential misdirection
President Bill Clinton went secretly from India to Pakistan in 2000,
attempting to calm tensions in the disputed Kashmir region. He was
seen talking with officials in front of a military plane that he
appeared to board. Instead, Clinton ducked around the front of the
aircraft to another jet parked nearby.
Both planes took off for Islamabad, as did a third jet painted with
the familiar baby blue markings of Air Force One.
Joe Lockhart, a White House press secretary for Clinton, noted that
reporters knew the president was on one of the planes, “but not
which one.” He said he and other officials had briefed the press
pool ahead of time and “although they didn’t know all the details,
it was made clear” that Clinton “was not going to travel on the
plane they were on.
“There was no attempt to hide anything, much less lie about it
later,” Lockhart wrote on social media.
Bush was visiting an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, during
the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, and, after all commercial air traffic
was grounded, officials wanted to move him to an undisclosed
location.
The full White House traveling press pool flew with Bush from
Florida to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where officials
reduced the number of reporters and staff on the plane. Bush and the
smaller traveling party next flew to Nebraska's Offutt Air Force
Base before eventually returning to Washington.
Bush's location remained secret throughout the day. However, the
White House did not suggest that the president was somewhere he was
not — unlike when Trump was whisked out of Turkey.
“You can imagine the different ways that this could have gone wrong,
where, for a period of time, no one would have been able to
independently corroborate the status of the U.S. president, or who
was in charge of the U.S. government,” Graff said. “And that’s an
incredibly dangerous moment for the world.”
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