New York Times Photographer Unwittingly Took Staged Photo of Trump
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.
Mills was leaving Turkey after a NATO summit on July 8, traveling on Air Force One with the press corps and with President Trump — or so he thought.
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’s cabinet knew about the covert operation, which was done because the Secret Service had received intelligence about a threat from Iran.
After the two planes landed at a military airbase in the U.K., Trump exited from the original plane, and Mills took the president’s photo as he did so. It is not clear how Trump got back on board a plane he didn’t travel on, but there was time to do so after the two planes landed.
“My 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?” says Mills, the Senior Washington Photographer for The Times.
“We had no idea what was really going on when we were departing Turkey,” Mills says.
“And now we’ve learned how the president was snuck off and into another aircraft to fly to the United Kingdom.”
“We didn’t 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,” he adds.
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.
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 — the only hint that something was amiss.
“The only other time I’d 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.”
On that occasion in 2014, the shades were drawn so the plane was totally dark for security reasons. But Mills didn’t suspect that the reason for the shades being drawn on the Turkey flight was so that they didn’t see Trump being transferred.
“Look 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’ve ever captured, where the president got off a plane that he really didn’t fly there on,” says Mills.
Used as a Decoy
Mills was with President Bush the day of the September 11 attacks and was on Air Force One when the aircraft — along with two fighter jets — were the only planes in the sky in the United States.
“We knew what was going on there,” says Mills. “On this Turkey flight with President Trump, we were not aware at all of what was going on.”
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.
“Traveling with the president of the United States on Air Force One, we know there can be some sort of threat wherever we go,” says Mills.
“It’s something we signed up for. We’re traveling with the president; it’s going to be dangerous. We didn’t know it was going to be that dangerous. And we had no idea we were going to be a decoy.”
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