.png)
“In my more than 40-year career, I’ve never been put in the position of being a decoy,” says Alex Brandon, chief White House photographer for The Associated Press. “Wild. Just wild.”
Brandon is one of several subjects who’ve lent their testimony to “Instadocs: The Decoy Plane,” a 28-minute mini-doc about Trump’s (and his curiously close aide Natalie Harp’s) clandestine escape from Air Force One in a catering truck that left the 13-member press pool — and a number of senior cabinet members — aboard a decoy plane that had purportedly been targeted by Iran.
Airing Sept. 4 on Netflix, “Instadocs: The Decoy Plane” is the third in the streamer’s Instadocs series from executive producer Josh Tyrangiel, a staff writer for The Atlantic and former Vice executive, following May’s “Alex Murdaugh: Unconvicted” and July’s “The Prediction Games,” about the controversial prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket.
As the story goes, Trump attended the NATO summit in Turkey on July 7, where he was welcomed by Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and spoke out against Iran. Just prior to his July 8 departure, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he would not be flying back on his shiny new $400 million Air Force One plane — that he’d received last year as an “unconditional gift” from the government of Qatar — but would rather be “taking the former Air Force One, from Turkey to Mildenhall,” a Royal Air Force base in England. Trump floated an unconvincing story about how the Qatari-gifted Air Force One would be sent to Mildenhall to be used as a tourist attraction, but Gram Slattery, White House national security correspondent for Reuters, reasons in the film that, “At the time, the main hypothesis was simply: the White House had changed the plane for security issues because they did not want to admit that the new plane was not up to snuff security-wise.”
Carol Leonnig, senior investigative reporter for MS Now, lends some context to the proceedings, revealing how Trump “put himself in greater jeopardy by insisting on flying this Qatari gift plane,” adding, “As Secret Service sources told me, the president was incredibly embarrassed that his Qatari gift jet, which he’d been bragging about, was not as safe as the old and less plush Air Force One. The old Air Force one has much more serious abilities to avoid any kind of missile. It’s ability to defend itself from that kind of attack is unmatched, but no president is a bigger target for assassination than Donald Trump.”
Indeed, there have been numerous attempts on Trump’s life, and Leonnig attests that “Iran has been trying openly to kill Donald Trump since January 2020,” or after Trump ordered a drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian major general. Iran’s desire to off Trump reportedly intensified after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei was assassinated in a joint U.S./Israeli air strike in Tehran on Feb. 28, 2026, leading to war between the U.S./Israel and Iran. And Leonnig reports that it was Israel who’d passed intel to Trump alleging an Iranian plot to shoot down Air Force One.
Cut to Turkey’s Ankara Esenboğa Airport on July 8, 2026. The first thing that struck the press pool as odd were the catering vehicles pressed up against the side of Air Force One. Brandon says he hadn’t seen anything like it in his forty years of photographing the president, so he “shot the shit out of it.”
Then “the second unusual thing happens,” offers Slattery. After the press pool boards the old Air Force One, “We’re told by the White House staff that we should lower our window shades.”
A month later, they learned that the shades were lowered to hide Trump’s escape in a catering truck.
That story was broken by Dan Lamothe, a national security reporter for The Washington Post, who’d received a tip that Trump and the White House had been lying repeatedly about which plane Trump took back from the NATO summit in Turkey. The source revealed that Trump had boarded the old Air Force One, then “quickly and secretly” exited the plane through the other side and got onboard a catering truck. Video even captured the catering truck pulling away as reporters boarded the old Air Force One, which transported Trump to a C-32 plane for the ride to Mildenhall.
Lamothe’s mega-scoop ran Aug. 10, and the next day, a follow-up story revealed that in addition to the press pool, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller remained on the decoy Air Force One, while “Natalie Harp and a handful of nondescript aides” got to ride safely with Trump, Lamothe explains in the doc. What the doc fails to interrogate is why Harp and a coterie of lower-level aides were allowed to fly safely with Trump while Rubio, Bessent and Miller were left on the decoy plane and whether the threat to Air Force One was credible or not.
Now, this isn’t unprecedented. Bobby McDonald, who served as a Secret Service agent from 1995-2015, discusses in the doc how then-President Bill Clinton took a secret plane (leaving a decoy) during a high-risk visit to Pakistan in 2000. And, in a statement to the filmmakers, a White House official said, “The United States Secret Service’s core mission is protecting the President, which they achieved.”
What they did not achieve, Slattery contends, was conveying strength.
“It I think has become a bit of a symbol about the degree to which this war has gotten to a place that the White House has not wanted or did not anticipate,” he says in the film. “Being in a catering van due to threats from Iran does not project power, it does not project control, and they know that.”
English (US) ·