The $400 million Qatari 747-8 has turned out to be the gift that keeps on giving - although not in the way Donald Trump envisioned. The taxpayers are on the hook for nearly $1 billion in security upgrades, and the President was so anxious to play with his new toy that he decided not to wait for the necessary equipment to be installed before using the new plane to get to Ankara for last month’s NATO summit.
The fact that he flew back on the old Air Force One generated plenty of embarrassing news copy for the president - much of it his own damned fault.
But that’s not all! It turns out that while we all saw footage of Trump getting onto the older plane, he was smuggled onto a catering truck so he could fly out of Turkey on a third jet - all because of what was described as a “credible threat” against his life.
In the meantime, the 747 we’ve been referring to as “old Air Force One” was filled with its usual flight manifest of cabinet secretaries, aides, and journalists who travel with the President. Which made all of them unwitting decoys.
“It’s interesting because the White House Correspondents Association came out right away and said, let’s talk about how we can, you know, how we can coordinate. And it was just such a milk toasty, stupid statement,” Karoli noted.
“And somebody said, I don’t even know who, I repeated it, was, they said, you know, you tried to kill us, how can we help you?”
A few among Trump’s inner circle got to be on that third airplane, including “human printer” Natalie Harp.
Aliza asked, “Is she that dark-haired woman that’s always standing behind him? I heard that she’s got like a cattle prod or something.”
“What people are saying, and I don’t know that this is true, I haven’t confirmed it, is that she stands there and has a little button that she pushes when he falls asleep that gives him a little to wake him up.”
So on top of Trump’s losing streak - all the attempts to prove election fraud in 2020, take over the elections in 2026, his tariffs, bogus cases against protesters and people who touched the water of the reflecting pool, put his name on the Kennedy Center, and his war of choice in Iran…
…he has now shown himself to be incredibly weak. And the subject of some hilarious catering truck memes. (We’re betting there are new ketchup stains all over the gilded crap on the White House walls.)
We talked about all of that, plus this week’s midterm primaries, the terrible living conditions on the USS Abraham, which has been stuck at sea for a long nine months, and more.
View the podcast or listen to it below.
