We shouldn’t have a problem with getting the President of the United States the hell out of harm’s way if there was a credible threat to his life via a threat to shoot down Air Force One.
Sending the press pool and White House staff on the plane as Air Force One to serve as a decoy, though, wow.
“If he was still on the old Air Force One, and there was a security threat targeting that aircraft, the Iranians would have believed that Trump was on the old Air Force One. That was the whole point, and yet he wasn’t. But these unsuspecting reporters, White House staff and military personnel were on that plane, and they flew. The idea that these unsuspecting reporters and others, White House staff, just didn’t know — is pretty remarkable,” said Harvey Levin, the head guy at TMZ – one of the last guys you’d expect to serve as a voice of reason.
This all went down last month when Donald Trump and Co. needed to get back from an NATO summit in Turkey on the $400 million plane gifted to him by the Qataris, which, apparently, wasn’t yet outfitted with the proper defense mechanisms needed to keep the president and his entourage safe in the event of a missile attack.
Per reporting from the Washington Post, the Secret Service, after deeming that a credible threat had been made against the presidential flying fortress, made the call to have Trump make a public show of boarding the plane that we would all know as Air Force One, then escape out a back door and into a catering truck that took him to an Air Force C-32A, a modified Boeing 757.
This Air Force plane would thus become Air Force One – whatever plane the president is on, regardless the make and model, is Air Force One.
Nobody on board what we know to be the Air Force One were made aware that Trump wasn’t on the plane with them; it took off, as scheduled, for the next stop on the presidential trip, London, and appeared on flight trackers as “AF1,” signifying to the world that the president was on board, to preserve the subterfuge.
Which, if there was a credible threat to the president, that’s fine – but why not escort the press pool and the staff off either with Trump to the Air Force plane, or to another plane, or just keep quiet about the whole thing until the Air Force plane had made it safely to London, then announced to the world what had just gone on, as opposed to putting the souls left on board in harm’s way?
I mean, other than the obvious callousness that Team Trump showed here, and shows on a regular basis, to the lives of others deemed to be lessers.
I get that the Trumpers don’t have a lick of spittle of respect for people in the news media, but their own staffers and military escorts?
Thinking the thinking of the staffers on this through: I’d doubt that the staffers would actually feel all that put out for having been exposed to a fiery death at 35,000 feet.
Particularly for the incels in the junior ranks, they’d probably expect to be met at the pearly gates as martyrs by the proverbial 72 virgins – 72 other virgins, that is.
The ink-stained wretches in the press pool, for their part, would be busy trying to track down a White House comms team back-bencher for a comment blaming their impending deaths on Democratic Socialists so they could file a “both sides” piece on the developing situation before splashdown.
The tragedy would be the deaths of the military, who would just be more in the way of collateral damage for Trump to try to use as fuel for his continued takedown of our democratic experiment from within.
They’d die so he could punch out a Truth sitting on the toilet at 3 a.m. about how none of this would have happened if he’d just gotten his ballroom.
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Chris Graham
