By making a planeload of staff and reporters into unwitting decoys as they departed a NATO summit in Turkey on July 8, President Donald Trump presented America and the world with a profile in cowardice.
Just imagine the delight of the mullahs of Iran when they learned this week that what was described as a “credible threat” caused Trump to secretly switch planes on the tarmac in Ankara by sneaking onto a catering container.
If there had indeed been a threat, the perpetrators would have been led to believe their singular target was aboard. Everybody else on the plane would have been collateral damage.
Back in April, Trump boasted that in his war of choice with Iran, “We can do whatever we want.”
His secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, declared in March that our warfighters were establishing “total dominance.” Hegseth said the conflict’s timeline “is ours and ours alone.”
That sound you can now hear is of mullahs laughing.
As everyone now knows, Trump initially sought to cover up his return from Turkey with compound lies, at first saying that he had decided not to return on the new Air Force One so service members in Europe could see firsthand this “magnificent” gift to the U.S. from Qatar. He added that he would be taking the long-serving Air Force One for “old time’s sake.”
Word later leaked that there was a “credible threat” against Trump and that, for all its magnificence, the new plane did not yet have an air defense ”package” comparable to the one in the older plane.
Only this week did we learn that even the older plane was deemed insufficiently safe for the president.
Photos show two catering containers hoisted alongside the older Air Force One, apparently so Trump could be spirited on one of them to a waiting military plane, having chickened out in a time of war, leaving others unknowingly in harm’s way
The sides of the containers read “Turkish DO & CO.” It might as well be “AIR TACO.”
Trump had then flown undercover in the military plane to Midenhall Air Force Base in England, arriving around the same time as both the old Air Force One and the new one. He slipped aboard the new one, where he was joined by the staff and reporters who had just arrived on the old one, unaware he had not been with them all along. They all flew back to America.
As reported by the White House Historical Society, the first President to travel by airplane on official business was Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 12, 1943. He avoided the threat of Nazi U-boats by crossing the Atlantic in a Boeing 31 Air Boat called the Dixie Clipper to Casablanca in North Africa. He was over Haiti on the return leg of the 17,000-mile round trip when he celebrated his 61st birthday.
Among the three future presidents who served in World War II was George H.W. Bush, who, at 20, was the Navy’s youngest pilot when his BF Avenger torpedo bomber was hit by anti-aircraft fire off the coast of Japan in August, 1943.
He completed his bombing run before bailing out. He was in the water when a submarine periscope appeared. He drew his pistol and was ready to do battle when the submarine that then surfaced proved to be American. He was subsequently awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the nation’s second highest medaL
John F. Kennedy was the 26-year-old Navy Lt. j.g. commanding Patrol Torpedo Boat 109 when it was struck by a Japanese destroyer. A remarkable survival tale began with a three-and-a-half-mile nighttime swim while pulling a man from his crew by the belt. It became a book and a movie. He subsequently wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage about political bravery shown by others.
Richard Nixon served with less distinction, but he did step up when the call to service came. Other presidents who did the same do not include our present one.
In 2018, Trump said that he felt “extremely brave” when he and his wife, Melania, visited Asad Air Base in Iraq the day after Christmas. He seemed to be only half joking when he added that he wanted to award himself the Congressional Medal of Honor. He has joked repeatedly about wanting a Purple Heart.
Trump did have a remarkable moment after his ear was grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet in July 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania, when he memorably rose, bloody-faced, with an upraised fist, but that seems to have been the instinctive showmanship of a man who always sees himself at center stage. He seems to have done nothing on record for the sake of others.
But Trump proved with a catering container on the tarmac in Turkey that he is unhesitatingly willing to place others in harm’s way.
