Almost ten years since he first took office, it often feels like Donald Trump has lost his ability to surprise us. He says outrageous things on a daily basis, but we are inured to that. His family businesses grow rich while he’s in the White House, but what else is new? Even the US President falling asleep on camera in the Oval Office is starting to get old.

The Trump show has been going on for many seasons now, and most of its plot lines feel familiar – but now and then, something comes along to show that he hasn’t entirely lost his ability to shock.

On Tuesday evening, reported jaw-dropping details of how Trump flew from the Nato summit in Turkey to the UK last month – at a time when he faced a heightened security risk from groups linked to neighbouring Iran. US intelligence had reportedly received credible threats that there might be an attempt to shoot down the President’s plane.

After ostentatiously boarding Air Force One – waving to the camera as he did so – Trump was bundled into a catering truck and transferred to a different military plane. The entire operation was clandestine: “Air Force One” is usually the callsign for whatever plane the president is aboard, but in this case, Trump travelled as “Reach 18” instead.

The decision to move the President also means that Trump in effect used some of the USA’s most senior journalists as his human shields, or at least as decoys.

Trump or his security team decided it was too dangerous for the President to be on board Air Force One, but the unwitting group of reporters that accompanies Trump on overseas trips, known as the pool, believed they were flying on the same plane as the President.

The ruse was a staggeringly high-risk manoeuvre: Air Force One has some of the most advanced countermeasures against attack of any plane in the world. It is equipped as a mobile command centre for emergencies, and has security systems in place against attack that won’t have been present on the backup aircraft.

At the time, Trump announced that he would be travelling on the “old” Air Force One instead of the brand-new jet he had been personally gifted by Qatar, because of security concerns. Reports suggested US intelligence had received credible threats that there might be an attempt to shoot down the President’s plane.

This had been a source of embarrassment – Trump’s shiny new plane just didn’t have the same security measures as the decades-old jet the president so viscerally dislikes.

As it turns out, the President did not fly on the old Air Force One. Instead, Trump’s extraordinary decision to allow himself to be smuggled out of the plane in a catering truck meant that his White House operation lied to the world about the President’s location – something that, to public knowledge, hasn’t been done for decades. In the hours immediately after 9/11, the White House did not disclose George Bush’s location, but it did not give false information about where he was. Trump broke with that precedent.

There might even have been a backfire risk: had an Iran-linked group chosen to use Trump’s visit to Turkey to launch an attack, they could have decided they would be unlikely to hit Air Force One itself successfully, and targeted a different, less protected plane travelling with it – only for it to be the one with Trump on board.

Whether the operation was the brainchild of Trump’s Secret Service protection detail, or that of an increasingly paranoid Trump, it was not without grave risk to the President – as well as the journalists and White House staff it used as decoys.

Trump has reasons to fear assassination, of course. In July 2024, he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt while speaking at a rally near Butler, Pennsylvania, during which a bullet seemingly grazed his ear. There have been several other attempts to target Trump since, including at his golf club in Florida in September 2024, and at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this April, though none of these got anywhere close to the President.

The incident is an encapsulation of Trump’s second term. He was at risk due to a war against Iran he had launched, which he has repeatedly claimed was already won – even claiming to have agreed a peace deal. His new Air Force One, which will be owned by his presidential library for his personal use after he leaves the Oval Office, was not secure enough to use.

And so, to find a way out of this predicament entirely of Trump’s creation, someone conjured up a drastic plan that led to the President hiding with catering, turning journalists into human shields and breaking a decades-long precedent about not lying about the President’s whereabouts.

Trump’s fear of assassination might be well-grounded – but it is leading him into some very strange places indeed.