Transcript: Trump Plane Swap Suddenly Gets Darker as Damning Leaks Hit

As Trump’s plane escape starts looking worse, press critic Margaret Sullivan explains what this tells us about his abusive relationship with the media—and ponders whether anything will be learned from it.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 13 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

By now you’ve heard that when Donald Trump left the NATO summit in Turkey last month, the Secret Service transferred him off of Air Force One and onto an alternative plane, flying him out clandestinely to avoid an Iranian threat. Many of Trump’s Cabinet members were left on the decoy plane. Now new leaks from inside the administration are making this whole affair look considerably darker.

It appears several of Trump’s most loyal aides were transferred to the secret plane with him, even as reporters were not informed about any of this and were left on the decoy plane as well. All this neatly symbolizes Trump’s abusive and authoritarian relationship with the media. So to dig into all of it, we’re talking to Margaret Sullivan. She regularly calls on the press to treat Trump as the abnormal threat he truly is, on her excellent Substack, American Crisis. Margaret, nice to have you on.

Margaret Sullivan: Thank you, Greg. Good to see you and hear you.

Sargent: You too. So we learned from The Washington Post that Trump was secretly removed from Air Force One onto a catering truck without the knowledge of the press corps, and possibly many of his Cabinet officials who were left on the plane. The Times’s reporting on this is quite scathing. It notes that, quote, “If Iranians were trying to shoot down the presidential plane,” then the subterfuge that protected the president “may have made targets” of those who flew aboard the jet.

Margaret, can you explain why that’s so highly irregular and objectionable?

Sullivan: Yes, it’s highly unusual. It’s actually shocking that Donald Trump would, you know, arrange for himself to be flown in safety while leaving many members of the press on the plane who didn’t realize the threat, and didn’t realize that the president was removed to yet another plane.

He has treated the press in a very unusual and very bad way for years now, and unfortunately, many members of the mainstream media, they don’t seem to care, or they don’t know what to do about it, but they keep covering him in this very normalizing way. Like, “Well, he’s the president, so therefore we have to believe everything he says,” or, you know, treat it with a great deal of deference. And, you know, this, I think, is a very vivid example of what he thinks of them.

Sargent: So now, based on more leaks, news outlets are reporting that others who accompanied Trump on the catering truck and onto the separate plane included White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, Walt Nauta, another top aide, and Natalie Harp, Trump’s executive assistant, who kind of functions like a security blanket to the president. I don’t know, Margaret, that seems pretty questionable.

Obviously, there are reasons Trump would want his closest aides around him, but this occurred even as all these other people were left on the decoy plane.

Sullivan: So his actions were to protect and keep around him the people you just mentioned. And one of them is, is Pete Hegseth. And, you know, not to protect and not to keep in mind or think about the welfare, apparently, of the press and some of his Cabinet members, including the secretary of state. So I think it is very telling, and it certainly speaks to the relationship with the press in a bad way.

Sargent: It really does. And so something similar happened with President Bill Clinton, at least similar in the sense that there was a decoy operation. But in that case, the press was briefed beforehand.

It was explained to the White House Correspondents’ Association, and they were told what sort of safety procedures were being put in place for journalists. It’s just plainly obvious that the Trump group didn’t think about the journalists at all in this case, right?

Sullivan: Yeah. I mean, maybe they thought, maybe they had some dire thoughts about it, like, “Well, if something happens, oh........

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