CNN's Kaitlan Collins broke down the whole ruse on Monday's The Source, walking viewers through the timeline: Trump boarded Air Force One at 8:24 p.m., then slipped off it minutes later — out of view of the press corps who thought they were flying with him — and climbed into an elevated catering truck, the same kind used to stock a plane's meals. By 8:30 p.m. it was hauling him away from Air Force One entirely, toward a third, much less conspicuous aircraft: an Air Force C-32A.
Trump escaping on a catering truck, possibly stocked with Big Macs, is ripe for meme mockery. On a serious note, journalists and White House staff unknowingly became a “decoy” for a suspected assassination plot after Trump secretly got off an Air Force One jet flying out of Turkey. Trump has always despised the press, but this puts it at a whole 'nother level.
The whole maneuver went down the night after the U.S. resumed strikes on Iran, while Trump was still in Ankara for the NATO summit. Per The Washington Post, the decoy operation left plenty of U.S. officials — and the public — in the dark about the President's actual whereabouts for hours. And apparently nobody's cleared up yet how Trump got from that decoy plane back onto Air Force One once it touched down in London, before he finally took the Qatari-gifted jumbo jet home.
Collins summed up the moment reporters got wise to it: they watched him walk down the stairs of the plane they assumed had just carried him to the UK — at nearly 11 p.m., realizing only then it hadn't.
This is your friendly reminder that Joe Biden visited Ukraine as air raid sirens sounded while the President was on the ground. He didn't hide or escape. He was the Commander in Chief and took that seriously.
