Trump’s disastrous cycle of bad decisions continues as Iran ceasefire collapses
This is an adapted excerpt from the July 9 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
On Wednesday at the NATO summit in Turkey, President Donald Trump said he thought his ceasefire with Iran was dead. Just hours later, he made sure it was.
Sources told MS NOW that the president was in midair leaving Turkey on Air Force One when he basically redeclared war. But the plane he was aboard wasn’t the same Air Force One on which he left the United States.
He had arrived in Turkey on his flying bribery palace, the luxury 747, “gifted” to him by the emir of Qatar. Trump showed it off to foreign leaders at the summit and beamed about it to the press. But when it came time to leave — and to bomb Iran again — that plane departed without the president aboard.
Soliciting and then using that plane may have been one of the most reckless national security decisions ever.
Instead, the president flew out on an older Air Force One from the existing U.S. fleet. On that flight, passengers were told to keep their window blinds closed.
Trump tried to explain the change by telling reporters it was so his gifted jet, which has been repainted in the same color scheme as his private planes, could be shown off to service members on its way home. But when a reporter asked why passengers were told to keep the blinds down, Trump replied, “Well yeah, because you’re, you know, probably on a dangerous flight.”
While Trump tried to brush away such questions, two former national security officials familiar with the matter confirmed to MS NOW that the president switched planes over concerns his new Qatari air palace lacked the necessary security systems “needed to safely manage a rapidly escalating conflict with Iran.” Specifically, according to a law enforcement official briefed on its capabilities, “the gifted plane lacks key military defenses of the original Air Force One, including the ability to refuel midair and missile-defense systems.”
Two other former security officials told MS NOW the new plane also lacks the command-and-control functions necessary, like secure communications, to serve as an airborne “situation room.”
It’s worth noting, as an aside, that The New York Times reported that as much as a billion dollars may have been taken from the defense budget to retrofit Trump’s new toy for service.
So the president of the United States was flying around on a plane he got from Qatar — a plane he has said will go with him when he leaves office, a plane that doesn’t have adequate missile defenses or secure communications and a plane that is not capable of refueling in midair — that he couldn’t use anyway.
Soliciting and then using that plane may have been one of the most reckless national security decisions ever, rivaled only by every other decision Trump has made in the past four months to bring us to this point. Because, of course, we’re back at war, and it’s clear the president can’t figure out how to end it.
Remember last year, around this time? Trump did the thing he said no other president would do and bombed Iran. He said its nuclear sites were “completely and fully obliterated”: Problem solved.
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Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
