How Trump gave away his secret war zone trip
The tweets stopped and soon the jig was up.
President Donald Trump’s trip to Iraq this week, his first to a war zone as president, was supposed to be a surprise. But the White House couldn’t keep the sensitive trip a secret for long.
After tweeting more than three dozen times over the last four days, Trump ceased his rapid-fire online missives on Tuesday night. By Wednesday, the president was nowhere to be found, without any scheduled public events. There was no uniformed Marine standing outside the West Wing, normally an obvious signal that the president is in the Oval Office. White House officials went silent. Soon, amateur aircraft watchers were tracking a Boeing VC-25, the military plane that serves as Air Force One, flying over Europe.
It wasn't the first time aviation obsessives had flagged possible signals that a president might be headed to a war zone. But the real-time tracking of Trump’s flight, paired with Trump’s Twitter disappearing act offered the strongest hint yet that he was finally making the trip.
Past administrations have taken extreme measures to keep presidential trips to war zones secret, fearing serious security risks if they’re made public. Journalists traveling on the trips must agree to strict embargoes barring them from reporting anything until the president is out of harm’s way. Often, the trips are so hush-hush that reporters are only allowed to tell their spouse and one editor that they are on the way to a war zone, where they sometimes have to rely on satellite phones to relay the news back to Washington.
But the age of secret presidential jet-setting is rapidly coming to an end, as amateur flight trackers send news of unidentified military aircraft crisscrossing the globe in real time via Twitter.
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