
Last month, President Trump made a dramatic exit after a visit to Turkey, prompting concerns about the safety of his planes. This week, we learned it was all a ruse.
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Rachel Abrams
from the new York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is the Daily. Last month, President Trump made a dramatic exit from a visit to Turkey. He switched his plane at the last minute to an older Air Force One, which caused confusion and prompted concerns about the safety of the president's planes. But this week we learned that was all a ruse. And so today I'm joined by Maggie Haberman, who tells us the story of a third plane, how Trump got on it, and why the administration worked so hard to keep it all a secret. It's Wednesday, august 12th. Maggie Haberman, welcome back to THE Daily
Maggie Haberman
Rachel thanks for having me.
Rachel Abrams
So, Maggie, our colleague Tyler Pager was on the show a few weeks ago and he told us the story that is probably by now a little familiar, which is that Trump switched off of a jet he had gotten from the Qataris and he switched to the old Air Force One plane because of a credible threat. And what this did was it prompted a lot of concerns that the Qatari jet was not properly outfitted with whatever safety measures it would need in order to carry the president safely. Now, the, the administration, as we know, was not happy that we reported that some of our colleagues got subpoenaed. And all of this made for a very dramatic story. And now we have come to learn that we didn't actually know the half of it.
Maggie Haberman
Yeah. So as often happens with White Houses in general, we often don't know the half of it. This is a particularly vivid example of not knowing the half of it for a variety of reasons.
Rachel Abrams
Rachel, please tell us the story.
Maggie Haberman
Sure. So what we knew was that the president was in Turkey for the NATO summit and he had taken this new jet that had been donated by Qatar that had previously flown some Qatari royals. It's more luxurious than the very old commissioned Boeings that first went into use in 1990 and that the president has complained about a lot. I cannot stress to you how large that Katara plane is. I flew on it as Pool last week. And it's really big and I don't like flying and I was very struck by how big it was. It's overwhelming.
Rachel Abrams
You and I actually talked about that plane on the show before and I believe we referred to criticisms of it as a flying bribe, but please go on.
Maggie Haberman
Those were the criticisms of it and still are. But regardless, it was pushed into service very quickly because the president wanted it quick. And that meant that it did not have the same security specifications that the older Air Force ones do. So he is in Turkey. He's on this plane that he was very, very proud of. I mean, really, this is somebody who a actually does know a lot about airplanes. He's owned them. He talks about them a lot. People in his government in Term one were pretty surprised by it. Number two, likes talking about the new toys aspect and this is what his own aides would say. But suddenly he posted on Truth Social they were going to fly the older Air Force One, which often travels as a backup with another Air Force One, for quote, unquote, old time sick. He was going to meet up with the newer plane, the Qatari plane, at a military base in the UK for anybody who has heard Donald Trump talk about the old Air Force One, the notion of old times sake was a
Rachel Abrams
little hard to believe because he was constantly criticizing it.
Maggie Haberman
Correct. It didn't seem like the kind of sentimental trip he would want to take. So that instantly raised a lot of questions for the reporters who were both with him and back here in the US That's a lot of press. He got asked about it at this press conference. I like you to address speculation that you're leaving Ankara, not in the new Air Force One, because of security concerns involving Iran. He started talking about, you know, the
Donald Trump (quoted)
life of a president is very dangerous,
Maggie Haberman
how he's the number one target for Iran.
Donald Trump (quoted)
It's a very dangerous profession. No, I'm number one on the kill list for Iran. They're lovely people. I'm number one. So I don't know. I can't tell you that. But I don't really care because I'm doing my job and I'm doing it, I hope better than anybody's ever done it because we have a country.
Maggie Haberman
And that comment further raised questions about what might be on his mind and what exactly was happening here in terms of how they were departing from Turkey.
Anthropic Team Member
Thank you all very much.
Donald Trump (quoted)
We'll see you back.
Maggie Haberman
You know, the press conference is over fairly soon. He went to the Ankara airport. He got into the older Air Force One that Plane took off. The reporters on it were told to lower their window shades, which was a real flag for me and other people at the time because it was evocative of furtive trips that presidents have taken into war zones before. For instance, when presidents have landed in Iraq, they were told to put the window shades down so that lights are not shining out because they can be a target. So this plane arrives in the UK and it's sitting on the tarmac for a little bit, and then the reporters disembark. And then soon after that, the President disembarks shortly before 11:00pm local time, and he walks from Air Force One, the older one, to the Qatari plane. So those were the known facts. And then our reporters got hit with subpoenas for reporting the concerns about a threat and also the deficiencies in the defensive capabilities of the new plane. What we've learned since is that the President wasn't on either one of those planes. He was on a third plane. And they were using a decoy measure, which is intended to mask the President's whereabouts because there was a threat that was, as we understand it, deemed credible.
Rachel Abrams
So tell us that story about the decoy. What are we talking about? What happened? What have we learned since our colleagues initially reported that the President had taken the old Air Force One?
Maggie Haberman
Sure. And I need to give a massive hat tip to our friends at the Washington Post who broke this story. You know, we caught up to some of it, but they reported, and we reported that the President, instead of leaving on the older Air Force One, which is what he had said.
Rachel Abrams
Mm. And what we had seemed to have seen.
Maggie Haberman
Correct. The President and some aides, they walked from that door, which is on the left hand side of the plane of
Rachel Abrams
the old Air Force One.
Maggie Haberman
Old Air Force One. And appears to have walked directly across to another door where one of those giant catering containers that services airplanes, commercial airplanes too, is attached to the door and it's lifted on a hydraulic and the President and some other people get off of the plane and get onto this container.
Rachel Abrams
Just to be clear, this is the thing that we see that is bringing our airplane food to us. Right. That goes up to a plane and unloads those trays that we all eat
Maggie Haberman
from, as we understand it.
Rachel Abrams
Okay.
Maggie Haberman
So they lower the hydraulic lift and the container comes down. And at the same time, the reporters are being told to close their window shades, which apparently was done so that they couldn't see any of this. That cart then takes the President either to another vehicle or directly to a third plane.
Rachel Abrams
Wait okay, so the President gets on this plane. Everybody thinks that he's getting on the plane, right? And instead of actually getting onto the plane and getting to wherever the President sits, you're saying he walks directly across and gets into a catering cart.
Maggie Haberman
Correct. What it made me think of instantly was Taylor Swift, you know, in that cleaning cart when she would go out to her concerts and they would bring her on stage. So the people in the seats high up backstage at like Madison Square Garden couldn't see her walking on stage. So it was just the illusion of just suddenly showing up. And so this obviously was much more serious. And I somehow doubt that the President enjoyed being in what I can imagine was not the best smelling catering container anyway. So he goes for this third plane. The third plane leaves. We have no idea whether it left before or after the older Air Force One. But at this point, the Qatar plane is either at the US military base in the UK already or it is about to be. When the older Air Force One lands, according to the pool report filed by the reporter on the plane, it was 10:16pm local time. They deplaned at some point, the reporter pool, and this is typical, the reporters will get off of Air Force One before the President does. We will get in place, you know, to wait to capture him coming downstairs and possibly coming over to talk to the reporters. In this case, the President did not disembark from this older Air Force One out the front door that he had been seen going into back in Ankara until 10:56pm so that's 40 minutes after the plane touches down, wheels down. That was a fair amount of time during which the President was brought by vehicle, as we understand it, from the third plane to that other side entrance on the older Air Force One and walked off as if he had been there the whole time.
Rachel Abrams
Okay? So basically the President does not do his typical thing of disembarking, maybe talking to reporters. There's about a 40 minute lag where they sneak him back onto the plane so that nobody is the wiser.
Maggie Haberman
Is that correct?
Rachel Abrams
What we understand. Okay. And so the people who were on the, let's call it the decoy plane, for lack of a better term, up until very recently, up until this Washington Post report, they had no idea that they were on the plane that the President deliberately didn't use because of a safety threat that his team at least thought was credible enough to not have him fly on. Is that right?
Maggie Haberman
Well, we wanna be clear about what we know and what we don't know.
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Okay?
Donald Trump (quoted)
Please.
Maggie Haberman
We don't know whether any of them knew or didn't know what was happening there. So I don't wanna, you know, speak broadly.
Anthropic Representative
Fair enough.
Rachel Abrams
Okay.
Maggie Haberman
The reporters absolutely didn't know, as far as we're aware. I think I can speak pretty comfortably to that effect.
Rachel Abrams
Cause the thing that I wonder about is whether or not people actually knew at the time. If I'm one of those people reading this coverage now, I might be thinking to myself, how much danger was I actually in? Obviously, nobody takes any chances with the president, of course, but I would imagine people are wondering, like, how serious. On the sort of the scale of serious threats the president got. This was, yeah, and I don't know
Maggie Haberman
that we're gonna know the answer to that, Rachel. What we were told, and we've reported previously, was that there was a threat that was from Iranian proxies. And, you know, this is after the president has begun this war on February 28th in Iran, and it has not gone the way he thought it was going to. He has long faced threats. The federal government, the U.S. secret Service, intel officials, they all make decisions with the president's protection as the paramount.
Rachel Abrams
Sure.
Maggie Haberman
That should not be a surprise to anyone.
Rachel Abrams
I hear everything that you're saying, Maggie, about, you know, the risk assessment. But I just feel worth pointing out here, though, that the administration has maintained that Air Force One, that that plane was safe, and it has also maintained that the Qatar plane was safe. But if either of these planes were safe, you would not need a decoy to begin with, right?
Maggie Haberman
Like, not necessarily. Again, we don't know what we don't know. So I don't want to speak to how these kinds of operations work. You know, one of the things that we talked about in our story that posted Monday night, and one of the things that our colleague Jonathan Swan and I got into in the book that we wrote about the first year that Trump was back, regime change, was this siege mentality that this administration has. Part of it was formed during the 2024 campaign when the president was also facing threats from Iran. And those stemmed from his drone strike against General Qaseim Soleimani in early 2020. Everybody who was connected to that strike in his administration faced threats after the fact. There were murder for hire plots against him. There were two unrelated assassination attempts that year, one of them in Butler, Pennsylvania. So that has been their mindset that when you're a nail, everything feels like a hammer. And so I do believe that that impacts some of their decisions. That having been said, the issue is, in part, that they have such a credibility crisis. This administration, they say up is down and night is day about so many things that there will be more concerns about what actually happened here, about how much risk he was in about the decision to take this move. According to our reporting, it was done very hastily. It was not something that was long planned for. I don't think that I can speak competently about whether the Qatari plane is safe, quote, unquote. But they did choose to take this plane that lots of people had concerns about whether it was fully secure. Then they chose to put out themselves that they were taking a different plane.
Anthropic Representative
Right.
Rachel Abrams
And what's so interesting about that, Maggie, is that like we have been talking this entire time about the Qatari plane. The Qatari plane, whether it was safe, whether it was safe enough for the president, whether it was Rush, et cetera. And as you mentioned, the actual story might have nothing to do with that. The actual story might have to do with some kind of misdirection. We just didn't know what kind.
Maggie Haberman
I think that the actual story has to do with both. I do, and I will say that while it is obviously unsettling to look back and think about the fact that reporters and some White House staff and some Air Force staff were on a decoy plane, the plane that they were traveling on was the safer plane as we understand it, in terms of the capabilities should anything compared to the Qatari plane. Correct. And so I do think that that's worth bearing in mind. But I think the bigger issue is still that we and other journalists are still surmising what we can. And we don't know what we don't know because this administration, despite its great claims of transparency, actually is not.
Rachel Abrams
We'll be right back.
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Rachel Abrams
Okay, Maggie, I want to talk about the issues around transparency that you mentioned and what that means. But first, I feel like a lot of people are going to hear this and think the Secret Service, the President's team, made all of this effort to have a decoy plane and to keep him out of harm's way. And I wonder how serious that is. And was that even for the best, Was that the right move and what were they assessing? And I wonder how you would respond to that.
Maggie Haberman
Those are all real questions, Rachel. And you know, again, I wanna be clear here. We are not in law enforcement. We are not in the intelligence community. We're not at the Secret Service. So they have a different job than we do. And any aspect of the federal government that was involved in this, they have real reasons for operating the way they do. And again, their premier concern is keeping the President safe. And that is what we would expect them to do. And based on this scramble, they were behaving as if there was a credible threat and they made decisions to try to protect the President. We know the President has been under a years long threat from Iran. The President worries about his own safety, but he doesn't make these decisions on his own. The entire top of the US Government was moving to protect the President. I don't know anyone among us who would not want to see the President kept safe. So that is all understandable.
Rachel Abrams
Sure.
Maggie Haberman
That is a separate question than what we're talking about in terms of how it was presented. And because this administration has claimed emergency powers on other matters so often, because they never briefed Congress about this war, because they are blowing up boats that are coming up from the Caribbean and saying that they are terrorist votes without really explaining things to the public. That is part of why the press, and not only the press, often want to hear more.
Rachel Abrams
Right. You are basically saying this should not just be dismissed as a simple story of the Secret Service being very competent in keeping the President safe, that the lack of transparency makes this more complicated for an administration that has claimed such broad powers and has basically pushed the envelope in so many ways. Can you just explain a little bit more about that, Maggie? Because the inverse is that reporters should have known that he was sneaking out of a catering cart. Like that. Also feels like that would be a security versus. Just explain a little bit what the line is between what reporters should know and what they should report and whether this is unusual in some way.
Maggie Haberman
It's a fair question. And on some of these things, obviously these are judgment calls. But there have been other instances where presidents have used decoys. The very famous one is when Bill Clinton was taking a plane from India to Pakistan. This was in the spring of 2000. And this plane that looked like Air Force One, that the press could see touches down, and they emerge, but an unmarked plane, according to reports at the time, landed. And then Bill Clinton gets off that plane. And there was a very small group of people who were covering this trip as reporters. One of them was Susan Page at USA Today. She knew about this. She knew ahead of time that this was happening, and it was out of security concerns.
Rachel Abrams
And she knew because the administration told her.
Maggie Haberman
Correct. The press and security officials summoned her, told her what was happening. They told her about the safety measures that were being put in place for reporters and the president. And that was something that she agreed to in terms of covering this.
Rachel Abrams
She agreed to not report on that.
Maggie Haberman
She agreed, at least for her sake, that she knew that the president wasn't on Air Force One, that they were, and she didn't disclose it.
Rachel Abrams
Maggie, can I just. Why would the administration even bother telling her something that they were then gonna ask her not to report?
Maggie Haberman
It's because these are judgment calls. And actually it ensures the president's safety in that case. That really is the goal. There have been presidents, including the current one in his first term, who went to Iraq on a Christmas trip. The reporters who were on the plane were called at the last minute. They were told they had to keep this quiet, and they did. And there is a trust factor. The idea is the president is on the move, that you know where he is. We are making a good faith effort to show you where he is and what has happened. And that is important. I mean, there are reasons that the press needs to know where the President is and so that they can convey it to the public. And so something like September 11, 2001, where disaster strikes, and the President of the United States at the time, George W. Bush, found himself aboard Air Force One with a very slimmed down press pool. They knew where he was, but he was making decisions on a moment's notice. And so it really is about visibility to the public because we are, are the public's eyes and ears.
Rachel Abrams
And it also sounds like it's important because it's the administration trying to have some kind of a trust with the press, because as we know, newsrooms, newspapers, news organizations, they do get requests from the government that says, look, we know you know this, but please don't report it because of national security concerns. And those requests are evaluated on a case by case basis. And so I think what you're telling me is that it is important to have some level of trust between the administration and, and the press, which makes me wonder if the breakdown of that trust, as indicated by this story and by the relationship this administration has with the current press, what the implications are for both, I don't know, the President's safety and also just public safety.
Maggie Haberman
It's a good question. It is an important point as to why so much mistrust of the media by this White House, plus efforts to try to control what the press is reporting on bases that really, they sometimes claim national security. And it's very hard to see where there's an actual national security or privacy concern. They have used that so many times that it degrades credibility. The President has criticized coverage he doesn't like as treasonous. He has, as an individual, sued news organizations and he is using the levers of government to try to control broadcast news when he can. And that all creates this very different climate that is not really productive for anybody, but certainly doesn't help them in a moment when they need people to believe them that there is something very bad going on potentially.
Rachel Abrams
Is there a world, Maggie, where because the administration does not trust the press at all, that this is somehow making the President less safe?
Maggie Haberman
I think there is a very good argument for that, Rachel. I mean, again, they were the ones who made public that he was taking a different plane and then they got angry that reporters asked about it. There is a world where there could have been an off the record conversation describing what was happening, where the press would then report it later, but would not have potentially jeopardized anybody. The reality is the press has a different job than they do. Our job is accountability. But presidents are also accountable to the public. And this is an administration that generally has not behaved that way. And in this instance at least, it really worked at cross purposes for them.
Rachel Abrams
Maggie Haberman, thank you so much, Rachel.
Maggie Haberman
Thanks for having me.
Rachel Abrams
On Tuesday evening, the Times reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, and Stephen Miller, the President's top domestic policy advisor were all on board the decoy plane. Rubio had been aware of the threat that had kept President Trump off the plane, but it was unclear who else, if anyone, also knew and at least some White House staff traveling on the plane were not aware of. We'll be right back.
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Rachel Abrams
here's what else you need to know today. Search and rescue efforts continued on Tuesday, the day after a deadly earthquake struck Colombia with firefighters toiling in searing heat to pull people out of the Rubble. At least 181 people have been confirmed dead so far, with more than 1,300 people injured and 153 buildings collapsed. Officials said they expected the numbers to rise. Today's episode was produced by Anna Foley and Rochelle Boncha. It was edited by Brendan Klinkenberg and Devin Taylor and contains music by Alicia Pietub, Rowan Ni misto and Pat McCusker. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for the Daily I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.
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The Daily – August 12, 2026
Hosts: Rachel Abrams
Guest: Maggie Haberman
This episode explores a dramatic and secretive episode in President Trump’s recent foreign travel, focusing on the mysterious circumstances surrounding his rapid plane switch during a visit to Turkey. The ensuing confusion sparked media scrutiny, questions of presidential safety, and deep concerns about government transparency. Rachel Abrams is joined by Maggie Haberman to break down the previously hidden details: the use of a decoy plane, the role of security threats, and what this reveals about the current administration’s relationship with the press and the public.
Episode’s Tone:
Investigative, skeptical, and richly detailed. The discussion balances respect for security protocols with an insistence on public accountability, echoing the high-stakes drama and deep mistrust that characterize both this specific incident and the broader Trump administration press dynamic.