Trump Tricked Staff Into Being Decoy During Iran Assassination Threat

President Donald Trump secretly switched planes following assassination threats from Iran—leaving some staff and members of the press as decoys aboard the old Air Force One.

When Trump departed the NATO summit in Turkey last month, he told the press he would skip a ride on his newly renovated Qatari-gifted Air Force One, opting for the original “for old time’s sake.” In reality, top administration officials had hatched an elaborate ruse in the face of a credible assasination threat from Iran, The Washington Post reported Monday night.

After boarding on camera, Trump was quietly rolled off in a catering cart that pulled up to the plane, two U.S. officials told The New York Times. The president made his escape to England in a third military plane, and secretly returned to the original Air Force One after he landed.

Meanwhile, members of the press and some staff members remained on the plane, none the wiser—and evidently vulnerable to attack. While it is standard for the Secret Service to use a decoy in response to threats, in this case, the White House purposefully misled the press to report that Trump was aboard Air Force One, endangering their safety.

Only a few top administration officials were briefed on the plan, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, an official with knowledge of the plan told the Times.

Following a report last month detailing security concerns regarding the new Air Force One, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, hinted that the administration might use subterfuge to aid in the president’s departure from Turkey.

“As the president has said recently, there are many enemies of America who have their sights on him, and we use every tool at our disposal—including distraction and misdirection—to address those threats,” he said at the time. When the Times asked for new comments about the president’s latest farce, the White House reissued Cheung’s statement without the line on “distraction and misdirection.”

On the ride home from England, reporters asked Trump why they had flown there on the old Air Force One. Trump claimed he wanted soldiers stationed there to see his new plane. When they asked Trump why they’d been asked to keep their window blinds shut, Trump ranted about his dangerous life as the president.

“I’m number one on their list, before you,” the president told the reporters. “But if I go, you go. Right?”

It seems that Trump and his team were sort of hoping it would be the other way around.

President Donald Trump reportedly shut down attempts to get Representative Max Miller, who is accused of abusing his daughter and ex-wife, to end his reelection campaign.

Politico reports that Trump’s team asked Ohio Republicans last week not to publicly pressure Miller to drop out of the race, because the White House believed he would refuse to do so. Before the president got involved, other Republicans and some White House officials were urging Miller to leave the race.

“They basically told us to back off,” one Ohio Republican told Politico, “and let the voters decide.”

White House officials told GOP leaders and other Ohio Republicans that Miller’s determination to continue his reelection campaign would nullify efforts to get him to drop out, and then those leaders would have to defend Miller and his campaign against Democratic attacks from his challenger Brian Poindexter.

The deadline for Miller to drop out was Monday at 4 p.m. State Republican Party leaders would have to have held a meeting two days before that to discuss his replacement. Republicans reportedly considered holding such a meeting in order to pressure Miller to drop out, but after hearing from the White House, they abandoned that effort.

Now they are stuck defending Miller, whose seat is supposed to be solidly Republican. His former father-in-law is Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno, who has backed up his daughter’s abuse allegations and said Miller is unfit to serve. Ohio’s other senator, Republican Jon Husted, has called for Miller to resign and end his reelection bid. Miller has defiantly refused.

Miller is accused of beating and burning his ex-wife Emily Moreno, fracturing his young daughter’s collarbone, holding her beloved stuffed bunny hostage, and sharing an inappropriate photo of her, among other numerous allegations. Meanwhile, Poindexter, a union ironworker, is seeing a surge of interest in his campaign to oust Miller from a seat once considered out of reach for Democrats.

This video of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth may just be the grossest thing you see all day.

Hegseth just took the criticism that he acts like a little kid “playing army” to a whole new level.

At the renaming ceremony for the Joint Base Lindsey Graham Monday, Hegseth was caught on camera wiping his nose and then running that same hand through his hair.

This clip hits different considering that in 2019, Hegseth laughed on air about not washing his hands for 10 years, saying, “Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them, therefore, they are not real.”

The humiliating moment comes at a tough time for the secretary, politically.

Harry Enten, CNN’s chief data analyst, reported Sunday that Hegseth’s approval rating had hit the “lowest of the low” among his floundering administration colleagues.

“Twenty-two points underwater, and this has been something that’s been going on throughout the entire administration. He has been underwater in every single poll that I could find. That is his job disapproval rating being above his job approval rating, and Iran has not helped,” Enten said.

Enten pointed out that Hegseth’s negative-22-point approval rating was significantly lower than former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s seven-point approval rating in August 2006, shortly before the midterm elections that year.

Rumsfeld was forced to resign after Democrats swept control of the House. Now it seems that our snotty secretary could be headed for a similar fate.

President Donald Trump dozed off during the signing ceremony for his executive order changing the childhood vaccine schedule Monday.

The ceremony started off like many others in the Oval Office: Trump making some wild claims flanked by other White House officials and a guest. In this case, Trump was rambling about vaccines alongside Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, right-wing podcaster and influencer Jayme Franklin, and White House adviser and deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

“I saw this early on and I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a, a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s, uh, body. And bad things happen in many, too many cases,” Trump said.

But shortly after that, Trump began to drift off, even as speakers such as Kennedy and Bhattacharya directly looked at and addressed him. While the NIH director was speaking, Trump appeared to fully fall asleep, his head leaning down on his right side, before catching himself.

A few minutes later, when taking questions from the press, Trump answered a question about escalation in the Iran war while sounding hoarse and fatigued.

The executive order itself is fully based on right-wing conspiracies and misinformation about vaccinating children, drawing from disproven claims about a link between vaccines and autism (which Kennedy is famous for pushing) and the supposed harm caused by combining certain vaccines into fewer shots, which the government’s own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says is completely safe as of this writing. Meanwhile, the U.S. is experiencing a 35-year record high for measles, with more cases of the disease in the last 18 months than in the previous 25 years combined.

President Donald Trump’s sweeping mass deportation scheme is completely crushing the U.S. court system—and that’s by design, Politico reported Sunday.

On July 8, 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement published a two-page memo expanding its policy on mandatory detention without bond to apply not only to immigrants who were caught illegally crossing the U.S. border, but to any undocumented immigrant.

Under the new policy, every undocumented immigrant is treated as someone “seeking” to enter the U.S., even if they have lived here for years, have families, hold jobs, and are in the process of seeking citizenship. Previous administrations have never applied this rule to immigrants already in the United States.

The result was an unprecedented surge on the legal system, as judges scrambled to hear thousands of detainees’ cases before ICE could whisk them away to other states.

Judge Fred Biery in the Western District of Texas told Politico that his courthouse typically sees 1,500 lawsuits every year—but as of May, they’d already hit 4,000 cases. “We’ve never seen anything like this in my career,” he told Politico.

Since ICE’s new policy on mandatory detention without bond was implemented, 469 judges have ruled that it is unlawful, while just 54 have sided with the Trump administration. Judges have ruled against detentions without bond more than 16,000 times in the last year.

“The third branch of government is saying no. We’re not going to do it this way,” Biery said.

Judge Troy Nunley, the chief judge in the Eastern District of California, told Politico that the strain has been felt by judges and court staff alike. “All of our judges, we were up in the wee hours of the morning doing these cases because we had never seen these before. It was all hands on deck,” he said.

In 2021, Nunley’s court saw just four immigration habeas cases. In May alone, his court saw 675. The judge has had to pull in other jurists from Hawaii and California to help shoulder the burden.

All over the country, the courts are pushing back, U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz told Politico. Until July 1, Schiltz was the chief of Minnesota’s federal district court. “The judiciary is the glue that’s holding the country together,” he said. “I do believe that’s true right now.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has moved to fast-track hundreds of thousands of asylum applicants directly into deportation proceedings without interviewing them. The government has also rapidly expedited the removal of immigrant children.