U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a farewell ceremony at the White House on the final day of Britain's King Charles and Queen Camilla's state visit, in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 30, 2026. Samir Hussein/Pool via REUTERS
According to a former FBI agent and a former Naval War College professor, President Donald Trump’s catering cart caper — that is, after hearing of a threat to his life due to the Iran war, leaving Air Force One hidden in a catering cart and moving to another plane while leaving dozens of people on the original vehicle as a decoy — could have been defended.
The problem is, the administration bungled the rollout.
“If you're asking whether there was a smoother way for the Trump administration to handle a potentially embarrassing situation, I think regardless of the specific facts we're discussing, the answer is always going to be yes,” Michael Feinberg, a former Assistant Special Agent in Charge with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), told MS NOW anchor Katy Tur on Thursday. “In this case, I'll confess I'm a little more sympathetic to the administration than the other commentators, simply because I could see a scenario where they learned about the Air Force One [situation] through an ongoing stream of intelligence — from sources that were still very much alive — and, not wanting to expose the methods of that intelligence source, decided they needed to carry out this ruse and never admitted it, even to the other people who were affected.”
He added, “It's a tough decision when you look at the larger scheme of international relations and national security; I think it's defensible. The problem is, once they got found out, they doubled down and pretended as though there was no risk to anybody else — that what they did wasn't a big deal. National security is not a world of good and bad choices; it's a world of bad and worse choices, and 'we did the best we could.' But that would require a level of self-awareness and transparency that nobody in this administration has.”
Tur only expressed partial sympathy to Feinberg’s perspective.
“There are a lot of different ways to look at it,” Tur said. “But we're dealing with this administration and this president, who has repeatedly shown where his priorities lie — who he thinks matters and who he thinks doesn't.”
She continued, “And I wonder, gaming this out: if something had actually happened — the kind of headlines you can imagine, the ones that would result from something happening on that plane — how could this administration honestly and reliably relay that information to the American public? That the president is safe, but everybody else was deemed expendable?”
Tom Nichols, a retired professor at the U.S. Naval War College, told Tur that “I think if that had happened — God forbid, and thank God it didn't — I think the first reaction from this White House would have been to lie like crazy.”
Speaking to AlterNet about Trump’s deception, psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham — a former Tufts University professor who led a letter earlier this year signed by three dozen medical professionals that warned of Trump’s apparent cognitive decline — broke down Trump’s psychological reasons for using other people as a decoy to save his own life.
“He has narcissistic entitlement because he's the president,” Abraham told AlterNet. “He is entitled to be protected, but he's throwing the press corps potentially to the wolves. Is this an unethical behavior? Yes. Is this cowardly? Sure. What is the psychological underpinning of this? Well, his degree of self-absorption and his inability to have empathy with the potential risks, dangers, and suffering of others. That's who he is.”