Bulwark Takes - Why Trump Was Secretly Moved Off Air Force One

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Donald Trump was secretly smuggled out of Turkey last month after U.S. intelligence reportedly warned of a possible Iranian assassination plot, but the journalists and White House staff traveling on Air Force One were left in the dark. Michael Weiss and former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos give their takes on the extraordinary Secret Service operation, the threat from Iran, and the explosive legal question at the center of the story: did the administration have a duty to warn the people who remained on the plane? They also examine why Trump has stayed silent about the incident, how this was kept secret for more than a month, and what this reveals about the growing threats facing the U.S. and its allies.This episode is sponsored by The New York Times.

Hey there, this is Michael Weiss and Mark Polymeropolis, taking over the bulwark takes again for the second time and hopefully not the last. We were invited on today to discuss the old Air Force One bait and switch. Donald Trump snuck out of the old Air Force one, not the new guitar jet that he was gifted by the royal family in Doha, but the old one he was supposed to fly out of Ankara for the NATO summit last month. And it turns out he was smuggled out deceptively in front of the full view of the traveling press corps in a catering cargo container and then put on board a U.S. military aircraft, which then flew to Britain. And all of this was done, according to the Washington Post, which wrote the story, to evade a possible Iranian assassination threat.

And so I'm joined by my esteemed colleague and friend and sometimes source Mark Balauropoulos. Mark, this is a bonker story. And the first thing that crossed my mind was, how the hell did Donald Trump keep his mouth shut about this for a month? It's wild. I mean, and also, I love the idea of Trump of all people having to travel in a, like, shipping container. Food cart. Food. It's in the food cart. It's almost like I should have been there to arrest him, you know, like, what's he doing? Big Macs in Ankara. I know. I've actually eaten Burger. I've eaten Burger King in Turkey. How do you like that? In Jabrker, Turkey. That's a different story. But, but Michael, I'm I love this story. I've fired up today to do this. You know, when the Washington Post broke this, like, this is heaven for Intel Geeks and present company included both of us. I mean, this is Intel porn. Are you kidding me?

Yeah. The James Bond deception from the Secret Service. That's wild stuff. I mean, having worked with them for many years, this is very unusual. There's kind of one celebrated case in the past. I think, I believe was Bill Clinton's trip to Pakistan when they did something like this. But this is really unusual. But so you have the, the, James Bond shit from the Secret Service. Then you throw what else on top of that, the threat itself, like what in the world spook the Secret Service? Was it drones?

I mean, you know, what were the capabilities? We don't know that. And you throw on top of that crazy legal issues in terms of duty to warn, as in like, hey, let's sacrifice the entire White House staff and press corps for the safety of the president. There's so much to unpack here, a wild story. And I think my phone blew up this morning. So I'm excited to be on with you today. Yeah. And I mean, you know, I'm trying to think back now in the last month. You know, we've had these serial threats of escalation in Iran, Donald Trump, you know, taking to truth social in the middle of the night and, you know, talking about possibly bombing energy infrastructure and bridges and not quite at the level of civilizational erasure, which he did several months ago. He's going to wipe Iran or Persia off the map. But you've got to wonder, what's going through his head now that he's not only being seriously inconvenient.

But having to essentially hide from his public, which he doesn't really like to do, right? I mean, he's he's being smuggled out like there's an active shooter kind of situation on the tarmac in Ankara. And this is all because the Iranians have been gunning for him. And they've been gunning for him not since the war six months ago started Operation Epic Fury. But since he took Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force in January of 2020, bombing him in Baghdad International Airport. And ever since then, there's been this kind of off again, on again, IRGC assassination plot against him. Apparently, he was warned during the campaign trail in 2024, that he had to, you know, take certain precautions then. So the Iranians have been on this guy's tail for a long time.

And in Turkey, I guess, I mean, we've both been there. Turkey has been the home or has played host to innumerable ISIS terrorist plots. The Russians used to hire Chechen gangsters, organized crime members to off dissidents there. I mean, it's a playground, an old Cold War playground for, I mean, every kind of international ruffian and spy service. So it actually seems for me quite plausible that the Iranians might have been able to penetrate his security detail there. But, I mean, yeah, it's just a wild story. I think the best way to do this is to unpack. Well, first of all, you're right.

I mean, so the Iranians have been gunning for Trump and the Trump administration officials from Trump 1.0 for a long time. I remember I was in an airport maybe a couple years ago and I saw some Secret Service. I could tell. I mean, I have experience with this. So there's a bunch of obviously protective detail folks with earpieces. And John Bolton was on the aircraft. That was after John Bolton had left the White House as National Security Advisor. So he had secret service protection, of course, until President Trump removed it from him.

But there's been that threat. But I think, you know, you bring up the locale in Turkey. And I'm not saying this because my last name is Polymeropolis. I've worked with the Turks. I'm not going to go off on a Turkish diatribe now. That's for another episode. And we'll laugh about that. Mark gets a very Hellenic Army when we talk about the Middle East and Turkey comes up.

So I was just saying. But no, but Turkey has been a place, as you said, in which there has been not only terrorist threats in the past, but also counterintelligence threats and that Turks have a relationship with the Iranian services, too. So maybe it's a good time to unpack. What do we think this actual threat was? I mean, and you have been really good in reporting on this is a little bit different, but in terms of the drone threat in Europe, what the Russian secret services are doing. So with the ever-evolving, you know, changes in warfare, I mean, what would have spooked the Secret Service to such an extent to go through this deception op?

I mean, was, you know, and we don't know actually what the threat reporting was. but it seemed to be sufficient to really cause a pretty dramatic change in modus operandi. And so let's kind of go over that. Do you think it could have been drones? Could it have been cells that were already established there in Turkey? Could it have been, of course, what we see a lot of groups doing, you know, state sponsors of terrorism but also terrorist groups, did they outsource it, perhaps, to criminal groups? But what in the world could they have done to spook, the U.S. Secret Service, you know, the greatest protective outfit in the world that

caused this. I mean, drones was the first thing that came to mind. I'm sure, coincidentally, a week ago, or even less, there was this drone incident in Leipzig, Germany, which has been sourced now, according to U.S. intelligence, to the Russians. In fact, the DNA that was discovered as part of this plot was linked to Lithuania, which has prompted a lot of German media to speculate that it was related to the DHL cargo plane bombing, which I reported on at the insider with colleagues at v. Square that happened in, I think, 2024. This is a wild story where basically the GRU, Russian military intelligence hired a bunch of, you know, in one case it was a former Soviet submarine commander, members of his family and his old, like, Navy network from the Soviet

Navy, to curry, or actually first assemble an incendiary device and then ferry it around, I think, five different NATO-EU countries to put it aboard a D.HL cargo plane to set it all off, right? right midair. And then the thing kind of went off prematurely. But anyway, it's been this kind of counterintelligence law enforcement dragnet to piece together this audacious and potentially very lethal GRU plot. And then also remember, Zelensky was in Ireland, was it? And there was a threat, a drone threat against his aircraft. He was doing a state visit to Dublin. And I think he had to be diverted or I don't know what had happened there. So drones was the first thing that came to mind. But then again, you have the situation where they didn't decide to not let the plane take off.

I mean, as you mentioned, you had journalists on board. You had crew. It's just, it was the plane taking off absent the president. So it wasn't about just protecting him as a person or trying to prevent some kind of, you know, detonation midair or something like that. I don't know. Maybe it was. Maybe it was something far more specific and sort of, you know, you know, you know, you know, human-based, as it were. This ad's brought to you by The New York Times. The amount of money that the

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They gather all the facts. They find the story. They talk to all their sources. and they distill it all down so you can learn what matters most in just minutes. And that's what journalists do to keep us informed. So wherever you seek it out, nationally, locally, support fact-based reporting. Let's say one thing I think is important to note. Let's shout out to the Secret Service. And I mean this seriously. You know, they've been under the gun.

It's a terrible fun right there. But, you know, for some of the assassination attempts against Trump, some of which the Secret Service, I think, was faulted. correctly for some of their procedures. But there's nothing wrong with the Secret Service taking drastic measures to protect the President of the United States. And I'll say, everybody should kind of react in a nonpartisan manner. We want the President to be protected, period. End of story. And so this was a pretty audacious deception operation. And, you know, if you kind of step back, and I spent the morning talking a whole bunch of former individuals involved in the protective service world, former Secret Service, former State Department diplomatic security.

And all of them were like, hey, you know, the Secret Service clearly was spooked. They probably did the right thing here. And so let's give them a little credit for that. Now that's so let's kind of bookmark that. That's important to note. But you just raised a really interesting point because what they then did was allow the Air Force one, the old Air Force one, with all the countermeasures, by the way, not that the cuttery little fancy vanity project doesn't have. This one has countermeasures. they let that fly with members of the White House staff and the press pool.

And so there is something in my old world called a duty-to-warn issue. And it's a regulation. It's kind of written in stone within the State Department, within the IC world. And that's the idea when you receive credible information of an pending threat. And there's really kind of a lot of legal language there. You have to warn the intended victims. You can't keep it from them. And so how they got the legal justification, if you believe,

the administration does those things. Not to not tell the press corps is pretty remarkable. And I had a couple calls from members of the press core, not the press pool, but press core today, who are really not that happy now. As a journalist, Michael, what would you be thinking if you were, if you woke up this morning and said, oh, shit, I was on that plane. Nobody told us? What the hell?

Honestly, what are your thoughts on that? As a journalist, what do you be pissed right now? And you, you know, sometimes you got to take one for the team, you know, like it's collateral damage. I mean, hey, Donald Trump's okay, but I got blown to hamburger bits aboard Air Force One. Look, I don't know. I mean, again, we're speculating. We don't know what the actual threat was.

We don't know how serious it was. We're now learning about this, what, a month in the rearview mirror. I think it is interesting, as I mentioned earlier, half jokingly, Trump hasn't said a word about this. And I think he's actually quite unnerved by the reporting now because he doesn't want to seem weak and vulnerable. You know, the idea that the Iranians could get him coming back from a NATO summit of all places, that's, that for him is, that wasn't part of the script of going to war with these guys, right? This war has gone horribly for the United States. He's very angry about the reporting about our, I mean, it seems even worse than what was initially thought, the shortage of critical munitions, everything we burned through from Patriot Interceptors to Thad missiles, you know, prisms, which are the souped up version of it. tackles, all of that stuff that we just threw at Iran. And now there's like this critical shorter so we can't even supply the Ukrainians with patron. He hates this news, right? Everything about Iran is pissing him off lately. So here you have this thing that's pieced together that,

oh, by the way, he also had to be smuggled out like, you know, the help in a sort of deceptive op in a catering container of all things. I mean, this is not very Donald Trumpy kind of optics. So there's a lot we don't know. But yeah, you're right. I mean, Why was it that only he was somehow protected and, you know, ferried to safety? Shouldn't they have just kept the plane on the tarmac or say we're going to, you know, not take off and do all these things? There's more here, I think, that meets the eye. There's going to be some follow-on reporting. It's not going to look good, I think.

I mean, when you think about this, you know, my first inclination was like, wow, I got to call my old lawyer friends in the intelligence community. Right. A great guy, Jim Petrilla, and he writes a lot all over the kind of immediate. Jim's a great guy. So I called Jim up. Jim was actually my lawyer in the Counterterrorism Center. So he was next to me when we did a lot of crazy stuff. And so Jim is as aggressive and forward leaning, yet also adheres to the law.

So, you know, he's going to pretty much take the side ordinarily of, hey, you know, sometimes like you got to do some stuff. He immediately said, wait a second, something really smells here in terms of duty to war. And something, there seems to be a violation. And then, of course, you kind of joke around. I'm not sure anybody in the administration cares about adhering to the law. But I think that that's the, aside from the threat itself, and we definitely need some more reporting on the threat, because that's going to color a lot of what we're talking about here.

I mean, you know, if it was just nebulous and the Secret Service overreacted a little, then maybe the press corps shouldn't freak out all that much. If it's really serious, that's a little bit of different story. But on the legal aspects, and, you know, this is where the Intel Geeks and us come through, that's a really big deal that they didn't, that they didn't inform. because when you take a look, and I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, or others, the listeners and viewers will correct us. I think there's 12 or 13 members of the press who go on the press pool. I think so on the plane.

It might be more than that. But generally, they're actually trusted. And so, you know, they're actually traveling as members of the presidential party there. And so to kind of separate them in terms of, you know, who's under threat and who's not under threat. When the threat, by the way, it's not against the president. It's against the airplane, presumably. And so that to me, really, there's a lot that I think the lawyers have to answer for now. And also, you have White House staff.

And the staff, whatever, you know, yeah, sorry. You know, when you're going, I mean. Maybe this is just Donald Trump's way of firing people, you know, like, yeah, instead of giving them a tink slip, sorry. It's very cult leader-ish-like. It's very monarchy-like. It is very, you know, save the king, you know, no matter what. But I think that, you know, we covered, you know, okay, the Secret Service are badasses in this. I'm good with that.

There's legal issues around this. There's the threat itself. But you just raised something before that I think is spot on and this is a perception issue. Like, does Donald Trump really want to be seen as smuggled out in a, first of all, it's not a, there were some reports. It was actually funny that it was like it wasn't just the catering truck. It was the catering cart. No, he was not in a cart, like stuffed in a cart that you see on an airplane. It was the catering truck, but still doesn't look really good.

I mean, it still seems like he's kind of slinking around. And for someone who I think cares about his image more than anything else, you know, this ain't so manly. Juxtapose this or just the idea now in everyone's mind of him being stuffed into this catering container or whatever. With the famous image from Butler, Pennsylvania, where he gets up blood dripping down his ear. He does the fist and he says fight. That became, I mean, to my mind, that was what basically got him elected, that image, emblazoned on T-shirt. it became kind of this symbol of his indomitability is invulnerability. And here, this is, this is very meek. This is, I mean, look, again, not to discount that the actual threat, and as you said,

the Secret Service, it seems like they perform their duties very admirably, and I'm glad nothing happened to him. But again, this is a man who everything is about optics, everything is about the kind of PR value. He is a creature of television. Everything is mediated through that, that, that medium, right? For him, the idea of being seen is sculpting in the shadows, hiding from the IRGC. The IRGC was not meant to have this kind of power projection capability by now, right? They were meant to be destroyed. The Iranian regime was meant to have been toppled and replaced with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and maybe some PKK Kurds and God knows what else. So all of this is just a reminder to him that everything that he planned has gone sideways, right? He is not where he wanted

to be with respect to this country and this, this adversary. I think that's a, that's a huge part of this. And, you know, there's, there's one side of me would say, okay, is this kind of an important story in the geostrategic context? And my first inclination was no, again, we're going to geek out on the Intel piece. But as you, as you kind of unpack it a little bit, you know, Donald Trump's decision-making sometimes is very emotional. It seems like, you know, it changes on a dime.

It's on the whims of the day. And if he sees negative press coverage, which this has exploded, by the way, this is, this is led this, I don't know what's on Fox News, but certainly led all the other channels and all the print media. I'm getting calls from the UK right now. I did, you know, an interview with some UK stations too, because people are seized with this. He's not going to like the way this looks. And will that, I guess the question for you on that is, is that going to actually affect any decision making when he so desperately wants a deal right now? And the deal that we're probably going to get on this. if he's so inclined on not going back to the military solution. I'm of the opinion. He actually does not want any more kinetic activity. And so he's looking for a deal. But he already was getting criticized, you know, by certainly by his right flank, kind of the neocon flank, that this might be a bad deal, just reopening the

Strait of Hormuz, essentially giving the Iranians control the waterway. Does this then, because he looks weak now with this story? Does that affect his decision making? What do you think? I don't know. I mean, you know, one could argue that, you know, I didn't believe necessarily that, oh, you know, Netanyahu wielded this kind of mesmeric capability to get Donald Trump to go to war. I think Donald Trump went to war in Iran because he saw it as inextricable from the legacy he wanted to create for himself, right? I toppled the Islamic Republic.

But part of that might have been driven or galvanized by these assassination plots, which, as I mentioned, you know, he campaigned in 2024 and was told the IRGC1. wants to kill you because you took out Qasem Soleimani of, you know, four years prior. He might well have seen this as a kind of act of revenge. Does this now alter his calculations with respect of what he does going forward? I mean, this is a man who's probably going to be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his days, even when he's out of office, right? I mean, Saddam Hussein famously tried to kill George H.W. Bush. Remember that line from W.? Who said, he tried to kill my dad, you know, because he was the first goal for?

you know, these these dictators in the region, they don't go quietly. And if you don't get rid of them, meaning, you know, have them, you know, drop through a trap door and hanged or lynch like Gaddafi, they remember. And there is always this kind of simmering, you know, or lingering threat in the background that their, their Macaburat services, if it's Saddam or the IRGC or Iranian intelligence, are going to, you know, try and, you know, do something untoward in future. So he may well think, I have to take care of Iran because I'll never be able to live quietly and safely for the rest of my life, especially given that I assassinated their leadership, right? Who knows? I mean, his psychology is, again, in a dissertations will be written on the sort of abnormality of this man's mind. And he's also, he's, there is this thing where he cannot get the result that he wants, right? You mentioned opening the straight of Hormuz. He's not going to be able to open the straight of Hormuz with some kind of diplomatic protocol. I mean, the Iranians are very clear about this, right? They're playing every car that they have.

They know that he wants out of this thing. He's wanted out of this thing since the first week or two of it, when he realized things were not going, as David Barnaya, the Mossad director at the time, promised him they were going to go with regime change and, you know, people turning out into the streets and celebrating him and the protesters returning and all of that. All of it went sideways very quickly.

There's no finality in his mind to this crisis and this conflict. So what is he going to do? I don't know. It's, it's, but I agree with you fundamentally. He does not want to return to active combat. And also, it's, it seems increasingly likely. We don't have the, the capacity to do what we would like to do in that regard. We don't have the air defense systems. We've run through our critical munitions, you know, our military industrial complex cannot manufacture this stuff fast enough, not only for ourselves, but also for allies. I mentioned Ukraine. I just, there was a story in Politico today that Europe is running low on interceptors at exactly the time that CIA is briefing the polls, the ball, the ball, and the Scandinavians, oh, you know, the Russians might actually try to test Article V's in viability and put troops on the ground inside NATO territory. You think the Europeans in the eastern flank want to donate their interceptors to Ukraine? Of course not. They want to, you know, keep it for themselves because they're going out to terrified of what might kick off. So we're in a very dangerous period, I think. There's a lot of national security threats, you know, ever present.

And, yeah, I mean, Iran has not been resolved. It's going to be ongoing for our I think years to come. Yep. Still on the plate. It'll be on the plate for the next president, whoever it may be. Absolutely.

Last point here to make or last question to pose is in a time period in which there's so much scrutiny on the war in which there's so much and I think there is dissension within different camps

in the White House. You know, you have the obviously the Vice President Vance camp versus Rubio, you know, Hegset, who knows, I mean, obviously he's a big war hawk. But when you have competing camps and you have competing staffers constantly talking to the media about the wisdom of the war or not or what to do, how in the world did this story not break?

I mean, you're a journalist. How did it not break for a month? How did they keep this secret? I mean, good on the Washington Post for really incredible reporting. You saw it. I mean, New York Times even came out and said, hey, kudos to our rivals, the post on this. But how did they keep this quiet? Something that, again, when I say we're geeking out on this, this is kind of like a sexy

story. It's kind of crazy. Nothing terrible happened, but it's a story everyone kind of digs his teeth into it. How in the world did, and I wonder what the kind of the bigot list is. I wonder how many people actually knew? But how did this not leak? How did not people back in the White House say, hey, you know, that trip you're on there. Yeah, you're lucky to get your ass blown out of the sky. I mean, it's crazy that it didn't leak. Everything leaks in Washington. I always joke about covert action stuff. And people would say, you know, or in this conspiracy theories about the CIA. My response is there's no conspiracy theories because everything we do is leaked within about five minutes.

We haven't run a covert... On the front page of the New York Times. We haven't run a covert action program in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iran that isn't spilled all over the newspapers within about six seconds of the finding. And so how did this not leak? That's the final question for you here.

You know, maybe it's simply a case of professional courtesy to the journalist they didn't want to tell them. You know, by the way, we were preferred to sacrifice you to save the president. I don't know. Or, as you say, it could have just been a very close

whole thing. How many people knew he wasn't on the plane? I mean, probably White House staff didn't know he wasn't on the plane. It was, you know, the Secret Service and a handful of others, you know, in the White House who were aware of it. But, and there's also the case that, you know, the leaking that we've seen so far is very self-serving, especially to people like J.D. Vann, who I think is driving a lot of this stuff in the Washington Post, the New York Times, about, you know, critical munition shortages for one thing. You know, the debate, the wrangle internally about going to war. I mean, Vance is obviously he wants to appear in 2028 if he's the nominee or even if he's in, I mean, certainly in, you know, a contest to be the nominee. He wants to be the isolationist guy. He wants to be the one to say, I was always against this. I went along with it to support the president and then I tried to get us out of it and all of that.

So he's, he's positioning himself in that respect. But it's, it's another thing. entirely to leak something that makes Trump look bad, right? You know, it's like in Russia, people can criticize the war, but they always criticize the chief of the general staff or the defense minister or the military commanders. They never really crossed the bridge over into criticizing Putin directly. I mean, they're beginning to now, which tells you just how dire the state of the war is internally in Russia. So I think if we have a sort of similar dynamic here, I mean, we're not quite the dictatorship that Russia is, at least not yet, but It's, you know, protect Trump, but argue against some of the things that he's done in a very kind of

strategic way. I don't know. I mean, again, I think this is a story we're going to be reading about for several days and weeks to come, including what the actual threat was, because it was very clearly aimed at the aircraft, right, not at him personally because they could have done something else. That threat piece is going to be huge. Like, how serious was this? And because, you know, again, it's going to be also a testament to what kind of overseas can. capabilities the Iranians have. If you actually think about everything we're worried about in terms of this war, we don't speak enough about certainly Iranian terrorism or kind of the patience Iran might have in putting forth terrorist plots. I mean, you know, when you can

when you when you when you go back to incidents that happen, you know, the decapitation strikes, all these types of things, it might take the Iranians, you know, months or even years to try and respond. So if we see this threat was mature, this was real, there was an operational cell on the ground, there was actually drones that were found. Then you kind of scratch your head and say, maybe this is something that we should worry about quite a bit more. But one last question on the press, does this hurt Trump's relationship with the press, which is very mixed to begin with? I mean, he insults Caitlin Collins and he yells at MSNOW reporters all the time and he's obnoxious as hell. Does the press then turn around and pester him, constantly?

on this story. And I would imagine that's going to happen the second he does any kind of gaggle in the future. Yeah, of course. I mean, again, you know, their lives were just as much at stake as his own. And they're going to want an accounting for why this deception, this particular deception, why not delay the flight or, you know, take a different route or say that the president wanted to have another meeting or something like that. Why? And also, if the assassins, obviously the idea was not to let them become aware of his presence being no longer on that flight, but on a separate military aircraft, which I think the New York Post, sorry, the Washington Post in the New York Times both reported that there was a flight tracker account on Twitter that noticed this strange

military craft landing in the UK, and nobody had an explanation for why. I mean, the IRGC can read Twitter, too. They might have gotten onto this. Also, the other question I have, where did this intelligence come from? Did we acquire it? Was it given to us by a third party? I mean, could the Israelis have fed this to the U.S.? Well, the Israelis were supposedly passing some type of intelligence on this at that time, but I don't know if we've kind of put that together. And some unnamed White House officials actually discounted it, too. So who the hell knows? What a story this is. Oh, my, again, Intel geek. It's crazy. Have an Intel porn. I don't know what you want to call it. We're going to follow it. This was great chatting about this, and we could

probably talk about it for all day. But this is something that's not going to die. and I look forward to the next time Trump has to face the press. And someone, what if someone who's on that plane says, hey, Mr. President, you know, was I your sacrificial lamb? Well, you know, he's exactly the kind of guy who, you know, someone's going to piss him off with the question, probably not even related to this, but something else. And he'll just be like, I shouldn't let them kill you. It's good to talk to you about this as always.

And thanks for joining me as we yet again hijack the bulwark takes. I'm Michael Weiss, and I was joined by my friend and colleague Mark Polymeropoulos, and we hope to see you again soon. Cheers.