The Flawed Logic of Trump’s Airplane Escape

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One of the more charming moments in the deliriously charming 1964 Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night , has the boys in the band trying to evade screaming fans and the paparazzi.

They duck in alleys, they dodge around corners, and in one scene, they all jump into a taxi and then climb out the other side and get in a different taxi.

It’s a wonderful, exhilarating sequence.

It seems less fun when the president of the United States does it.

A few days ago, Americans learned that Donald Trump had to do something like the Beatles car switcheroo to evade not admirers or photographers but an Iranian assassination plot.

When the Secret Service got wind of a plan last month to kill Trump—apparently by taking out Air Force One—it engaged in a clever bit of misdirection: Trump boarded the usual Air Force One 747 in full view of the cameras, and then everyone shut the window shades as Trump surreptitiously climbed into one of the large containers that delivers food to an airplane galley.

That container was then trucked over to a smaller C-32A aircraft, where Trump exited the container and boarded the plane (which, because of the president’s presence, instantly became the real Air Force One).

The C-32A and the 747 then both flew to the United Kingdom, with the 747 continuing the ruse by identifying itself as “Air Force One.” Trump got off the smaller plane in Britain, snuck back onto the 747, and then exited from it as if he’d been on board the whole time.

He then got on another 747, the lavish new Air Force One 2.0 given to Trump by the Qatari government, to fly home.

We learned about the plane swap in Turkey in a scoop from the Washington Post reporter Dan Lamothe and his colleagues, but more reporting now suggests that this whole escapade went from a Beatles movie to a Marx Brothers comedy .

Trump, as it turns out, was not alone on the food truck.

While the press and some others on the plane were told nothing about a threat, Trump reportedly climbed into the catering container with three of his White House footmen: Dan Scavino (his former caddie) and Walt Nauta (his former butler), both of whom are now White House aides, and Natalie Harp, his executive assistant.