Trump’s catering truck caper

President Donald Trump boards the new Qatari-gifted Air Force One en route to the United States following his participation in the NATO Summit at Royal Air Force Mildenhall on July 08, 2026. | Win McNamee/Getty Images This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day.

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It’s not exactly the stuff of Netflix spy thrillers, but …it’s also not every day that the president makes a covert getaway in a catering truck .

White House officials revealed on Monday that, before a flight from Turkey to the United Kingdom last month, President Donald Trump used the truck to secretly move between planes , then switched aircraft again after landing in Britain.

The ruse deceived both Trump’s press corps and many of his staff, who weren’t warned of the last-minute plan in advance.

But the deception was undertaken, officials said, in response to an assassination threat from Iran.

Such plots are one tool weaker powers can wield in asymmetric warfare, or conflict between unevenly matched opponents.

Iran can’t strike the US homeland with conventional military force the way the US can strike Iran.

As the catering truck caper attests, however, that doesn’t put Americans entirely beyond Tehran’s grasp.

Instead, Iran is finding other, less conventional ways to inflict damage on US turf — from assassination plots to cyberattacks.

We might need a bigger catering truck to escape all of that .

“We have more cybersecurity regulations for your credit card than we have for the nation’s water supply.” — Joshua Corman, founder of I Am the Cavalry, a digital security nonprofit Iran doesn’t appear able to launch the kind of major cyberattacks that would seriously disrupt Americans’ daily lives en masse.

But over the past five months, attacks linked to Iran and pro-Iranian groups have targeted US medical device makers, social networks , public transit agencies , and — most recently, and perhaps most alarmingly — small-town utilities.

Unknown hackers compromised the water and wastewater systems of municipalities in at least 12 states last month , prompting water shut-offs, flooding and boil-water notices in a handful of locations.