特朗普搭乘餐车逃跑一事，折射出一场永无宁日的战争

What Trump’s catering-truck escape says about a war that won’t end

2026-08-12T04:01:29.017Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/12/politics/trump-air-force-one-iran-war

President Donald Trump’s use of a catering truck in a secret escape from a NATO country amid an Iranian threat is the latest embarrassing twist of a war that repeatedly defies his claims of victory.

The Secret Service did its job by using whatever method was necessary to spirit Trump out of Turkey in July, ultimately on an alternative jet to one that has been bringing presidents home safely since the 1990s.

But belated revelations about the drama, first reported by the Washington Post, kicked up a major new political storm. Most significantly, the ruse conjured up damaging new imagery about an unpopular war that Trump can’t end.

The existence of a potential threat against the president doesn’t in itself mean his war against Iran is a failure. But the spectacle of him leaving incognito after a NATO summit is likely to be interpreted overseas as a new affront to American power. It also raises this question: If Trump cannot guarantee his own safety on the territory of a major ally, how can his administration’s case that it has all but obliterated Iran’s military capability and regional terror threat be fully believed?

Iran has yet to comment. But its apparent success in metaphorically forcing Trump to take cover is a propaganda coup. For all the president’s bravado, the regime doesn’t seem to be heading for collapse or begging for a deal.

The hijinks at Ankara airport are just the latest occasion when reality has mocked the administration’s rosy war narrative.

Trump on Monday, for instance, insisted yet again that the Strait of Hormuz was “open now.” Yet the critical waterway remains effectively under Iran’s control, meaning that US forces have been fighting for months to return to the status quo — and open strait — that prevailed before the war.

Everyone has meanwhile lost count of Trump’s predictions that a deal is imminent, only for the stalemate to grind on.

In another sign of apparent US strategic disarray, the war that Trump declared won after a few days has seriously depleted US missile stocks, including nearly 80% of interceptors for a key missile defense system, CNN reported last week.

Oddly, given their position, presidents often travel through scruffy locations, since security precautions force them to enter buildings through underground garages, back entrances, kitchens and service elevators. So even the kingpin of gold-plated Mar-a-Lago may not have been too shocked to slum it in a hydraulic catering truck in Ankara.

But Trump’s clandestine departure from Turkey sits poorly with the president’s self-image as a winner and a strongman.

Even when bloodied and rumpled after an 2024 assassination attempt, he rose, pumped his fist and said “fight, fight.” When a gunman tried to rush the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in April, Trump went on TV to insist he wouldn’t be intimidated and the show must go on.

“Donald Trump absolutely hates anything like this,” the president’s first-term communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin told CNN’s Phil Mattingly on “The Lead” Tuesday. “He hated when he had to go to the bunker because of the threat environment in the White House … He wanted to go back immediately to show he’s not scared, he’s not running.”

Griffin, now a CNN commentator, added, “This speaks to me that this was a very real threat. If he’s willing to take these measures and to do it. It speaks to the moment we’re in, in the Middle East.”

Trump’s tarmac bait-and-switch also fueled new controversy over the presidential plane fleet, since he’d previously abandoned plans to fly his new red, white, and blue jet donated by Qatar, which critics warn lacks sufficient security systems for a president. The president and the White House have denied that a threat led them to resort to a backup aircraft.

Then, there’s the issue of whether staff, Secret Service agents, journalists and crew were in mortal danger when they took off on a plane that Trump had been shown on television boarding minutes previously — before secretly leaving.

On Tuesday, Trump was asked by reporters why it was considered too dangerous for him to fly on one of the planes usually used as Air Force One while the same did not apply to members of the press.

“The plane that I flew on was at greater risk … because that would be the plane, I think, that they would be more likely to go for,” the president said.

But his comment didn’t answer the question at issue, because by climbing aboard the presidential jet, he’d given every impression he planned to travel on it — before his unannounced departure.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, told CNN’s Erin Burnett Tuesday that Trump “put people in harm’s way to save himself — that’s who Donald Trump is.”

Pritzker then tied the incident to the wider war, saying, “He’s willing to put troops in harm’s way … he slinked away literally in a catering truck while the reporters and his own staff were on a plane that apparently was under threat.”

Pritzker’s comments put the drama at the center of the midterm election battle. And there will likely be investigations if Democrats win one or both chambers of Congress in November.

Trump, who has survived at least two direct assassination attempts, is likely to spend the rest of his life under the threat of an attack from Iran. His exposure dates to his first term, when he ordered an attack that killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. Iran’s incentive grew when Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in US and Israeli air strikes at the start of the current war.

Choreographed displays of defiance at Khamenei’s funeral in July saw protesters demand the death of the president. So there is good reason for the Secret Service to take any intelligence about possible attacks seriously. There have been past reports of killings of Iranians opposed to the Tehran government in Turkey, and the Iranian regime has been one of the world’s most prominent exporters of terrorism.

“I do find it entirely plausible that there might be a serious threat to the president by some Iranian-backed entity. The US, the UK, a number of European states have foiled or disrupted Iranian-backed attacks over the last several years, frankly going back decades,” retired US Army Lt. Gen. Karen Gibson said on “The Lead” Tuesday. “They’ve demonstrated an intent and a capacity to do this.”

Trump warned in July that 1,000 missiles were “Locked and ⁠Loaded and aimed at the ​Islamic Republic of Iran, with ​thousands of more to immediately follow” if it attempted or succeeded in assassinating him. In practice, any response to the death of a president would not be decided by orders he left behind, but by his successor, in this case, Vice President JD Vance. A need to restore US deterrence and credibility would likely mandate a massive US escalation.

Still, it’s notable that Trump did not respond to his indecorous departure from Turkey with an emotional response of his own. Perhaps his success in keeping it quiet until now saved face. But he has also consistently reached forks in the road and balked at mission creep that could result in heavy US casualties.

It’s possible that the Secret Service’s actions in Turkey may have averted an attack that could have drawn the US deeper into a quagmire.

But Trump’s furtive flight from Turkey makes it much harder for him to argue he’s made the world safer.