Last night, President Trump confirmed a Washington Post story alleging that when he left the July 8 NATO summit in Turkiye, he was flown out secretly on an alternate aircraft, not Air Force One, in order to avoid an alleged Iranian assassination plot. After boarding the old Air Force One plane in front of news cameras, he was secretly transferred to another plane, an Air Force C-32A (a Boeing 757 configured for VIP transport often used by State Department officials) inside of a food service truck, according to the Post account, and then flown to Mildenhall, England where he was somehow transferred back to the old plane—which had flown on to England using the Air Force One call sign and had landed a few minutes after the C-32A—from which he made his exit.
“I think actually the plane that I flew on was at greater risk,” Trump told [https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/trump-says-his-plane-faced-greater-risk-flight-change-2026-08-12/] reporters on Tuesday. “I think it was at greater risk, because that would be the plane I think that they would be more likely to go for.” Trump indicated that he had deferred to the Secret Service in using the C-32A.
The decision to use the old Air Force One plane as a decoy—along with the flight crew, White House staff, and reporters that were aboard it–was reportedly based on an intelligence report from Israel warning of a heightened assassination threat to Trump from Iran. According to a report in Middle East Eye, Turkish officials believed it to be an Israeli fabrication, intended to sabotage a potential US-Iran deal. MEE’s sources said that the Israelis had warned that the Iranians had infiltrated shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles into Turkiye to be aimed at Trump’s new Air Force One plane (the Qatari-gift 747-8).
