Maggie Haberman brought her Trump administration expertise to MS NOW’s “Deadline: White House” on Tuesday to break down the new Washington Post bombshell that Donald Trump was smuggled off Air Force One in July to use attending White House press and members of his own staff as a decoy flight against an unnamed Iranian threat.
While the “Regime Change” co-author and New York Times journalist understood the federal government’s need to prioritize the president’s life over anyone else’s, by later gloating to that same press that “if I go, you go” during such threats, she said Trump undercut any trust built between the administration and the press that cover it.
“I’m getting threatened all the time,” Trump told press in an Air Force One clip aired on “Deadline: White House” Tuesday. “I’m No. 1 on their list, before you, but if I go, you go. So perhaps someday you want to change professions.”
“They are always going to put the president’s safety first,” Haberman told host Nicolle Wallace. “What ends up happening is that the press and some of his own staff end up on the older Air Force One, which does have defensive capabilities, which certainly would be safer than the Qatari jet in that moment.”
The real issue came when the president wasn’t transparent with the press about the threat at hand.
“He could have said, ‘We had a concern, we had a threat, I was on a separate plane,’ he could have told reporters off the record, the White House could have told reporters off the record. None of that happened,” she said. “Instead, there is this gamesmanship where he is sort of taunting and saying, ‘If I go, you go,’ and that was not the case in that moment.
“Again, I want to stress, I understand the federal government is rightly going to be more worried about the president than it is anybody else, but there are tradeoffs, and that was one of them.”
Watch the full MS NOW segment below:
The flight from July’s NATO Summit in Turkey was previously the subject of New York Times reporting that found Trump’s new Air Force One jet gifted by Qatar lacked necessary defensive capabilities, which forced a shift to the old Air Force One after a detected assassination threat from Iran. That reporting led to Trump’s DOJ subpoenaing Times reporters for their sources, which were later dropped. The fact that Trump wasn’t even on that flight baffled Haberman further.
“Those subpoenas don’t exist anymore … I can’t say that I fully understand it,” she said.
“Maybe there is more here, clearly there is always a lot more that we don’t know when it comes to this particular government, but they are very good at creating these displays of openness … and in fact, it’s just a show,” Haberman continued. “It’s just a spectacle. They’re very good at keeping secrets when they want to, and this was one they tried to. But I don’t know if the secret they were attempting to keep was this or if they were just generally trying to intimidate from further reporting in general. We know that this president likes secrecy and does not like information getting out of his government unless he sanctions it.”
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