President Donald Trump pauses before answering a reporter’s question aboard Air Force One en route from Florida to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, January 4, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
President Donald Trump's attempt at dismissing the concerns about his Air Force One ruse was far from convincing, with the D.C. insiders at Pod Save America lambasting him for reaching a new level of idiocy and accidentally proving his critics right.
A recent report from the Washington Post revealed that Trump's efforts to evade a potential attack from Iran had been more complicated than once understood. While attempting to leave a NATO event in Turkey, reports initially suggested that fears of an attack led Trump to fly out on an older model of Air Force One, rather than the new one he received as a gift from Qatar, given that it lacked certain security features. According ot the Post, however, once onboard, he was snuck out on a catering truck and taken to a military craft that flew him to the U.K.
In carrying out this plan, Trump left numerous reporters to fly on the legacy model Air Force One, unaware that there were concerns about the craft being attacked. In response to that growing controversy, Trump attempted to argue that, in fact, he was still the one in the most danger.
"I think actually the plane that I flew on was at greater risk," Trump said. "I think it was at greater risk because that would be the plane I think that they would be more likely to go for."
On the latest episode of the Pod Save America podcast, former Obama administration officials Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer reacted to this rationale, with the former dismissing it as "the dumbest thing possible." Favreau also noted that the argument actually proved critics right, since it acknowledged that the plane presumed to have Trump on it would be the most dangerous.
"Yeah, they'd be more likely to go for the plane you were on. Of course," Favreau, Barack Obama's former director of speechwriting, said. "Which is why they tried to put you on another plane that they didn't know about... I don't know why I say that in such a shocked way, but like that is it's just like new levels of Trump being a dips——."
"On one hand, it is very, very funny that he hid in a catering cart, that he flew home on a secret plane, that he handpicked the people who would survive with him like Pete Hegseth and the woman who prints all of his documents," Pfeiffer, Obama's former senior communications adviser, added. "But then he sent Marco Rubio to die with the press, and Marco Rubio was the only one on that other plane who knew what was happening."
The pair later added that, had such a situation occurred during the Obama administration, the decisions about who would go with the president on the secret military plane would have been decided "by actual protocol and not by who he likes most."
