Update: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Marco Rubio, along with other senior aides, remained aboard the decoy Air Force One after Trump was secretly removed from it and taken by catering truck to the other aircraft.
Having just finished watching The Bombing of Flight 103…
… this news brings up an interesting aspect of what Trump did:
John Hudson, a Washington Post reporter, posted this om X and there are a number of good AI cartoons in the replies.
Here’s the front-page story from The Washington Post (subscription)
This isn’t being lost in commentaries about the incident which is just being revealed. Basically what Trump did was being taken from Air Force One to in a catering truck to the plane used as Air Force Two when the vice president uses it. It apparently was already available in Turkey as part of the U.S. presidential travel and security operation. Published accounts so far have not explained exactly why it had been positioned there.
Once the Iranian missile threat was judged credible, it became Trump’s escape aircraft. He left all the journalists and staff onboard the jet that was the object of the threat.
What makes the episode so striking is slightly different: the people aboard remained on the aircraft that any potential attacker was apparently supposed to believe Trump was still aboard.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth boarded the other jet separately using external stairs in an effort to make the flight appear normal, according to the newspaper. Trump then flew to the UK en route to the US, where he reboarded the old Air Force One and was seen descending from the aircraft after it landed at RAF Mildenhall. Reference: BBC News.
He flew secretly in a smaller aircraft - the modified Boeing 757 often used by the vice-president as Air Force Two shown below in Turkey.
We have no way of knowing what was in Trump’s mind or what he was feeling if he watched Air Force One on the runway or even saw it take off.
But imagine that he could.
What did he feel watching it?
Perhaps something as coldly self-protective as:
Better them than me.
Hegseth appears to have been the only senior administration official who accompanied Trump on the secret flight.
The coincidence that struck me personally is that I had just watched The Bombing of Flight 103. I doubt it is the sort of television miniseries Donald Trump spends his evenings watching. But had those images been fresh in his mind, the experience might have felt very different.
The series depicts, in horrifying detail, what happens when a Boeing 747 is destroyed in flight — pieces of an enormous passenger aircraft and everything inside it raining down from the sky.
Air Force One is also a Boeing 747.
Watching that huge blue-and-white aircraft roll away while knowing that someone might be trying to destroy the plane they thought he was aboard would have been an extraordinary moment for any psychologically normal person.
What it was like for Donald Trump is something only Donald Trump knows.
Related:
This is a reaction to having just seen a segment on MSNOW about all the GOP governor candidates who are election deniers - including Mr. Pillow who aspires to be Gov. Pillow of Minnesota.
Trump Media has rolled out “Truth API,” which sells faster access to posts from Trump and other influential Truth Social accounts. The customers so far are largely high-frequency trading firms, paying roughly $60,000 to $100,000 a month for the feed. Trump’s posts can move markets, so seconds or milliseconds of advance machine-readable access can potentially have enormous value. (AP Article)
This led me to ask “what’s next?”
I posted this as a comment to ‘Get this man a catering cart’: Internet ridicules Trump as he battles Mother Nature
Don't think DJT would have given flight 103 any thought. Nor would the horrific descriptions of the crash have piqued his interest. DJT's inclusion of Hegseth only on his flight, hypothetically, could have been to declare war on Iran if AF1 was downed. Given that Hegseth was with DJT, I wonder if those left on the "target" aircraft, in retrospect, feel secure with this MAGA presidency. DO NOT TAKE A FREE RIDE ON A GOVERNMENT 747. So much for "as the presidency turns". Be careful out there.
If I have repeated my story above, sorry. Genetics. My mother told the same stories, over and over and over.
Lunch time. Got to go.
Plan to mail my primary vote today. Wrote in Vlad, Genghis Khan, and Heydrich the Hangman for the Dispute Resolution Committee.
Sunny day, but the living ain't easy.
Tommy
He's obviously a monster.