On July 8, Trump went up the steps of the old Air Force One in the presence of cameras in Ankara, waved to the traveling press and vanished inside. But no one on the ground or on that plane could have known that he would not be on that plane. He was said to be taken out a side door onto the tarmac, and in a matter of minutes put in a milky milk carton and driven across the airfield to a smaller Air Force C-32A, a Boeing 757 militarized version, to be driven out of Turkey, leaving the 747 everyone assumed contained the president.

The Washington Post broke the story this week, quoting a source inside the US who knows the operation in detail and corroborating information it had seen, and it has been picked up by the New York Times and CBS News and other outlets on the same lines. What one gets is the image of a security set up that is more like a real assassination than a diplomatic photo op, with no one on the decoy jet even told by the security apparatus that they were at a NATO summit stopover.

CBS reports that the reason for the shooting was intelligence suggesting a credible threat from Iranian-backed groups to shoot at Trump's plane as it departed from Ankara. Weeks earlier, the New York Times and CBS had already reported that officials were so concerned about a strike on the president, or his plane, that they were canceling plans to fly the brand-new 747 from Qatar, the new owner. The amount of deception in this week's report is what's new: not just choosing a different aircraft but staging a boarding and sealing up the press cabin, and then taking the president onto a third, unmarked plane of all things.

Many were surprised that reporters, who thought they were flying with Trump, were told to lower their window shades before takeoff. Later, Trump deflected the criticism in telling the pool they were “probably on a dangerous flight” due to “people that I described in very simple terms.” He also gave a line that's now more of a gallows' joke: there was the possibility that told the press might be in trouble; “If I get in trouble, they get in trouble.” The actual president's C-32A touched down at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk around 10:20pm, followed by the decoy 747 and the dazed and confused press pool several minutes later. What exactly Trump did to get back on the C-32A before he went down the stairs to meet troops has not been explained.

This all happened within a context. It came after weeks of Trump publicly taunting Tehran for its quest to break out a nuclear weapon, declaring at the NATO summit itself that he was "number one on the kill list for Iran" for years. The kind of talk that works in a crowd is defiant talk; security people interpret that differently: that sort of talk is a constant reminder that the threat assessment against the incumbent president is not a joke. The move was not unprecedented but also highly unusual and demonstrates either "specific actionable intelligence" or a "belt and braces approach," Paul Eckloff, a former special agent with the U.S. Secret Service, told the AP. Democrat Richard Blumenthal, who is running for re-election, took it a step further, describing it as surreal and to be investigated by Congress, language that will surely resonate with an already polarized Washington on how the administration has handled the Iran issue.

It's also a money motive that provides this tale with more than filmic texture. The mere availability of a "decoy" option goes back to several years of Air Force One replacement program failures. The fixed-price $3.9 billion contract for two new presidential 747s was signed in 2018 and Boeing has already taken in over $2.8 billion in cost overruns to deliver on a target now set to 2028 or later. That timeline had the administration frustrated, so it took an old Boeing 747 that was donated by Qatar and gave it to L3Harris to be secured for the Air Force, which says the work will cost less than $400 million although congressional Democrats and outside analysts dispute the administration's cost estimates, citing as high as $1 billion once encrypted communications, missile countermeasures and hardened systems are put in place. It was only fitting that the newly refitted jet, which was on its first overseas flight, was stuck on a British airbase for a public relations photo opportunity while the real president rode home in a decades-old backup, all of the while he was riding in style to the tune of billions of dollars.

Outside of Washington, the episode serves as another number in the ongoing math problem of the Iranian-American standoff that, besides Washington, has shaken up the shipping lanes of the Persian Gulf, compelled Tehran to commit to resuming gas production by the end of this month following strikes against its energy facilities, and kept the global oil market guessing about what's happening with Iran and the Hormuz corridor. It's an indication of how seriously the administration is taking the network's reach as they're willing to deceive by orchestrating a multi-aircraft spectacle to get their own president to the point of action.It's a testament to how seriously officials take the reach of Iran's proxy network, even as the administration publicly declares it's “low-keying” the conflict and giving pressure to bear space to work. The days when the leader of the free world is smuggled across a tarmac in a food truck won't be forgotten soon.The Congress has demanded a more complete account of the threat, the expense or both, and the image of the leader of the free world being smuggled across a tarmac in a food truck will not soon go away.