![\"Donald](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Trump-Air-Force-One-800x420.jpg\")
Trump boarding Air Force One in 2019. | Photo by Shealah Craighead <\/p>\n Trump boarding Air Force One in 2019. | Photo by Shealah Craighead <\/p>\n
Veteran New York Times photographer Doug Mills says he was shocked when he learned he had unwittingly taken a staged photograph of President Trump exiting Air Force One. <\/p>\n
Mills was leaving Turkey after a NATO summit on July 8, traveling on Air Force One with the press corps and with President Trump \u2014 or so he thought. <\/p>\n
Roughly a month later, it was revealed that after boarding the aircraft, Trump had been secretly whisked away inside of a catering truck to another plane. Not even Trump\u2019s cabinet knew about the covert operation, which was done because the Secret Service had received intelligence about a threat from Iran. <\/p>\n
After the two planes landed at a military airbase in the U.K., Trump exited from the original plane, and Mills took the president\u2019s photo as he did so. It is not clear how Trump got back on board a plane he didn\u2019t travel on, but there was time to do so after the two planes landed. <\/p>\n
\u201cMy first reaction when I saw he was not in fact on the same airplane, I was in shock, and I was just trying to figure out: how did he do this?\u201d says Mills, the Senior Washington Photographer for The Times.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had no idea what was really going on when we were departing Turkey,\u201d Mills says. <\/p>\n
\u201cAnd now we\u2019ve learned how the president was snuck off and into another aircraft to fly to the United Kingdom.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t know going to Turkey to go to a NATO summit was going to be this dangerous. But for them to go through all of these covert maneuvers tells us that he was at a high risk,\u201d he adds. <\/p>\n
Mills, a veteran Washington photographer who has been covering U.S. presidents since Ronald Reagan, has made thousands of trips on Air Force One, flying over a million miles. <\/p>\n
The 66-year-old photographer says that he and the rest of the passengers were told by an Air Force One flight attendant to draw all the shades \u2014 the only hint that something was amiss. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe only other time I\u2019d ever been asked to lower the shades on Air Force One was flying on a very secret covert trip with President Obama going into a very hostile area in Afghanistan at Bagram Air Force Base.\u201d <\/p>\n
On that occasion in 2014, the shades were drawn so the plane was totally dark for security reasons. But Mills didn\u2019t suspect that the reason for the shades being drawn on the Turkey flight was so that they didn\u2019t see Trump being transferred. <\/p>\n
\u201cLook back on this photo of him coming off the older Air Force One in the United Kingdom was probably the only staged moment like this that I\u2019ve ever captured, where the president got off a plane that he really didn\u2019t fly there on,\u201d says Mills. <\/p>\n
Used as a Decoy <\/p>\n
Mills was with President Bush the day of the September 11 attacks and was on Air Force One when the aircraft \u2014 along with two fighter jets \u2014 were the only planes in the sky in the United States. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe knew what was going on there,\u201d says Mills. \u201cOn this Turkey flight with President Trump, we were not aware at all of what was going on.\u201d<\/p>\n
He adds that typically when the Washington press is traveling to a hostile region, staff will make them aware beforehand, allowing for more mental preparation. <\/p>\n
\u201cTraveling with the president of the United States on Air Force One, we know there can be some sort of threat wherever we go,\u201d says Mills. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s something we signed up for. We\u2019re traveling with the president; it\u2019s going to be dangerous. We didn\u2019t know it was going to be that dangerous. And we had no idea we were going to be a decoy.\u201d <\/p>\n
Affiliate Disclosure PetaPixel articles may include affiliate links; we may earn a commission if you buy through one. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Trump boarding Air Force One in 2019. | Photo by Shealah Craighead Veteran New York Times photographer Doug…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":323773,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,11,10],"class_list":["post-323772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=323772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/323773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}