“I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you.” – Batman
Just out of curiosity. If I receive information indicating a credible threat that a gunman will be at your grandkid’s school this Friday, would it be acceptable for me to take my daughter out of class that day without informing anyone? I don’t have any obligation to protect any child but my own. Taking my daughter to the zoo that day doesn’t increase the danger to anyone else and leaving her there wouldn’t mitigate any risks. So there’s no problem, right?
The Secret Service decided to use Airforce One as a decoy. If you’re fine with that, okay. I think it’s pretty shitty they didn’t at least tell the passengers there was an increased risk. Maybe some of them would have caught a different flight. Fleeing to safety with a few of your sycophants while leaving the rest of your followers at increased risk without their knowledge is pretty craven behavior.
I’m just going by the dictionary definition of decoy. If you deliberately disguise that the target isn’t aboard Airforce One you are using it as a decoy. So you’re right, unless my daughter was the specific target I wouldn’t be using the other students as a decoy.
I’d suggest there should be an effort vs reward calculus happening
Could the secret service have done something to make it safer for everybody with minimal effort?
Suggested upthread was the idea of delaying the flight by 2 hours and then announcing that Trump wasn’t on it -
Sounds like fairly minimal effort to pretty good reward to me, thus a shitty action not to take
I cannot really concur. If there are vehicles A, B, and C available, you are not going to reveal in advance to anyone on which one the principal will travel, or even make the final choice too early. (Turns out we put him on D…) So they are all decoys, or all except one, but nobody without a need to know has the information on which is which.
That in fact happens routinely with any President. When the President travels between the White House and Andrews AFB, he takes a Marine helicopter. At least 3 identical helicopters make the trip each time, the rest serving as decoys. The pilots certainly know that’s their role, I wonder if any other press/staff, etc are on the decoys.
I hope Im not representative of the US voting public. I’ve just read your OP and this is the first I’ve read of the plane switch, Trump hiding in a catering truck, etc. And I follow political news, though chiefly NPR, a few Substacks, and the SDMB.
Nothing but respect for Heather Cox Richardson … but did this story get any major coverage at all? Seems like it was essentially buried by major outlets.
I, also, learned of this story from this thread. My husband said he heard it on NPR, though. So they reported it. But it didn’t get a ton of play there, because I hear a lot of NPR and missed it.
I usually make the rounds between ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox to compare who is saying what. I didn’t see anything on Fox (for the short time I was able to stand watching), but the other three covered it, and not in a complimentary way.
Yes, ABC, NBC, CBS did mention it; it was discussed on several shows on both CNN and MSNOW. It’s been prominent on social media. And late-night comics (Fallon and Kimmel’s sub-this-week, Anthony Anderson) have each referred to it several times. Also, as mentioned by @madmonk28 the New York Times covered it extensively; as mentioned by @puzzlegal NPR has featured it.
But what does NOT happen on those occasions is a big show of Trump boarding one of the helicopters being made, then smuggling him (in some sort of container) onto another one of them.
It’s the “big show of him boarding” part that made the legacy Air Force One into a decoy.
And yes: on that July day, all those on that legacy AF1 were indeed decoys for whatever missiles were reported to be on the way.
Here we are, eleven days from the start of the news coverage, and it’s long gone. Googling shows that the vast majority of the news coverage was on August 11-13.
My suspicion is that it won’t have changed much; those who already didn’t like him are going to view it as one more condemnatory thing, and those who do like him are going to overlook it anyway.
I’ve finally come to the conclusion that a lot of voters just don’t think what Trump is doing is wrong. They know he’s corrupt, enriching himself, his friends, and his family, but they’re okay with it. They’d think such actions were wrong if Biden or someone else was doing it, but as long as it’s Trump they just accept it as good. I simply don’t know how you deal with people like that.
So far as I can tell … no Donald Trump meme image has really lasted and certainly has not done any reputational damage. At one time, I thought the mid-September 2024 “eating the cats & dogs” meme-a-palooza fallout was his 2024 campaign’s death knell**. But nope – all that dried up and blew away within two weeks, the early-October Walz-Vance debate happened without much notice or consequence (apparently, “weird” had run its course), and the Trump campaign positively owned the last month before the November 2024 election.
Anyway, I specified “meme image” above because it does seem like one – just one – verbal meme has lasted and has at least done some, if not much, reputational damage to Trump: TACO. Very little vote-flipping damage, but enough to at least make MAGA have to defend TACO from time to time (though just ignoring it works for them, too).
** and I still think that if the US had held a no-notice pop-quiz presidential election within a few days after that Harris-Trump debate, Harris would have won all the swing states and been President. Oh well - back to reality.
Underlying the ridiculous “pox on both houses” thinking is something akin to this: “Democrats shoplift candy bars out of the checkout lines once in a while. Ergo, it’s totally excusable for Republicans to gun down all of the grocery store’s workers and pack all the store’s contents into a truck and drive off. They BOTH steal! A pox on both houses!”
So even if something Trump is doing is acknowledged to be wrong … if any Democrat anywhere has done anything even remotely comparable, Trump is absolved. “Yeah, he’s a piece of garbage … but they’re ALL pieces of garbage! Trump tore down the East Wing? I bet you never heard about the Democratic alderman in Nowhere, NoState that once introduced a motion to TEAR DOWN A PARK SHELTER!!! Huh, huh – what about that? Samesies!”
Yes. Though if a sex scandal hadn’t popped up, I suspect ‘Donald hiding in the catering truck/making Marco Rubio an unwilling Decoy’ would have lasted longer. But Sex Scandals always dominate.
Obviously people were going to become enthralled with all the ‘where’s Melania/what of Melania’s wifely duties has Natalie taken over’ speculation.
TACO–Trump as the guy who always Chickens Out–has something in common with Decoy Plane/Hide in Catering Truck: they both depict Donald as Weak. As someone who can’t stick to his pronouncements, and as someone riddled with physical cowardice.
MAGA doesn’t like weak. Even independents don’t like weak. These things stick in the culture and may lead non-Democratic voters to…not bother to vote. Voting is too big a reminder that our President is a spineless wimp.
Yes, it’s all part of the rationalization process. But when the comparisons get ridiculous enough, the rationalizer may find him- or herself being mocked for their tortured analogies.
Anyway: here’s a pictorial treatment of our latest Thing That Bothers (Some) Voters:
