The Daily - All the President_s Planes

0:00Rachel AbramsFrom 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 for 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.

0:35Rachel Abramshow 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. Rachel, thanks for having me. So Maggie, our colleague Tyler Page 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.

1:15Rachel AbramsWhat 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 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. Yeah. So as often happens with White House in general, we often don't know the half of it. This is a particularly

1:45Maggie Habermanvivid example of not knowing the half of it for a variety of reasons, Rachel. Please tell us the story short. 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 Boeing's that first went into use in 1990 and that the president has complained about.

2:12Maggie Habermana 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. You and I actually talked about that plane on the show before and I believe we were referred to criticisms of it as a flying bribe, but please go on. 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,

3:09Maggie HabermanThey 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's sake. He was going to meet up with the newer plane, the Katari 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 time's sake was a little hard to believe. Because he was constantly criticizing it. Correct. It didn't seem like the kind of sentimental trip he would want to take.

3:36Speaker 3So 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'd 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 life of a president is very dangerous. How he's the number one target for Iran. It's a very dangerous profession.

4:07Maggie HabermanNo, 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... 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 Turkey. Thank you all very much. We'll see you back. You know, the press conference is over fairly soon. He...

4:35Maggie Habermanwent 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 the 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.

5:04Maggie HabermanSo 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 11pm 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

5:34Rachel AbramsThe 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. 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? Sure. And I need to give a massive hat tip to our

6:03Maggie Habermanfriends at the Washington Post who broke this story, 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. And what we had seemed to have seen. Correct. The president and some aides, they walked from that door, which is on the left hand side of the plane. Of the old Air Force One. Old Air Force One. And it appears to have walked directly across.

6:32Maggie Habermanto 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.

6:54Maggie HabermanJust to be clear. This is the thing that we see that is bringing our airplane food to us, right? That like goes up to a plane and like unloads those trays that we all eat from as we understand it. Okay, so they lower the hydraulic Lift and 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

7:20Rachel Abramsa third plane. 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. 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

7:48Maggie Habermancouldn'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 to 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 16 p.m. Local time they de-planed 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

8:46Maggie Habermanolder Air Force One out the front door that he had been seen going into back in Ankara until 10.56 p.m. 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.

9:08Rachel Abramsand walked off as if he had been there the whole time. 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. Is that correct? 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

9:35Maggie Habermansafety threat that his team at least thought was credible enough to not have him fly on. Is that right? Well, we want to be clear about what we know and what we don't know. Okay, please. We don't know whether any of them knew or didn't know what was happening there. So I don't want to, you know, speak broad enough. Fair enough. Okay. The reporters absolutely didn't know as far as we're aware. I think I can speak pretty comfortably to that effect. Because the thing that I wonder about is whether or not people actually knew at the time

10:01Rachel AbramsIf 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 that we're going to 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.

10:31Rachel Abramson 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 US Secret Service, intel officials, they all make decisions with the president's protection as the paramount. That should not be a surprise to anyone. I hear everything that you're saying, Maggie, about the risk assessment. But I just feel worth pointing out here, though, that the administration has maintained

10:58Maggie Habermanthat 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? 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 Hassim Soleimani in early 2020. Everybody who was connected to that strike in his administration faced threats after the fact.

11:54Maggie HabermanThere were murder for higher plots against him. There were two unrelated assassination attempts that year, one of them in Butler, Pennsylvania. So that has been their mindset, you know, that when you're in 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.

12:53Rachel AbramsThen they chose to put out themselves that they were taking a different plane, right? 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 etc 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 I think that the the actual story has to do with both I do and I will say that

13:21Maggie Habermanyou know, 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 compare to that. 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.

13:52Rachel Abramsbecause this administration, despite its great claims of transparency, actually is not. We'll be right back. 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.

14:31Rachel Abramsto have a decoy plane and to keep them 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. Those are all real questions, Rachel. And again, I want to be clear here. We are not in law enforcement. We are not in the intelligence community. We're not at the Secret Service.

14:51Maggie Habermanthey 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.

15:20Maggie HabermanThe 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. 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 boats without really explaining things to the public. That is part of why the press and not only the press often want to hear more. Right. You were basically saying

16:18Rachel AbramsThis should not just be dismissed as a simple story of the Secret Service being very competent and 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. That also feels like that would be a security risk. Just explain a little bit.

16:44Maggie Habermanwhat the line is between what reporters should know and what they should report and whether this is unusual in some way. 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, the 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. And she knew because the administration told her. Correct. The press and

17:44Maggie Habermansecurity 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. She agreed to not report on that. 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. Maggie, can I just... Why would the administration even bother telling her something that they were then going to ask her not to report?

18:11Maggie HabermanIt'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 you know Christmas trip The reporters who were on the plane or 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 11th, 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.

19:10Rachel AbramsBut he was making decisions on a moment's notice. And so it really is about visibility to the public because we are the public's eyes and ears. 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.

19:38Rachel AbramsI think what you're telling me is that it is important to have some level of trust between the administration 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? It's a good question. It is an important point as to why so much...

20:06Maggie Habermanmistrust 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.

20:22Maggie HabermanThey 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. 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? I think there is a very good argument for that, Rachel. I mean, again, they were the ones who made public that...

21:11Maggie Habermanhe 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.

21:41Rachel AbramsAnd in this instance, at least, it really worked across purposes for them. Maggie Haberman, thank you so much. Rachel, thanks for having me. On Tuesday evening, the Times reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Besend 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.

22:19Rachel Abramsand at least some White House staff traveling on the plane were not aware. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Search and rescue efforts continued on Tuesday, the day after a deadly earthquake struck Columbia with firefighters toiling and 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.

22:55Rachel Abramsofficials 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. It contains music by Alicia Beechu, Rowan Nemisto, 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.