Iran threatened to shoot Air Force One out of the sky over Turkey – and the media's biggest outrage is that Trump didn't announce it.
Now Bill O'Reilly just torched every reporter pretending to be shocked.
What O'Reilly found in the history books just made the entire press corps look like fools.
O'Reilly Calls Out Media Bias Over Trump Air Force One Iran Threat
The story broke Monday when the Washington Post reported that Trump secretly switched planes in Ankara, Turkey on July 8, slipping out through an airport catering truck while reporters on Air Force One were told to close their window shades.
Iran had threatened to fire a surface-to-air missile at the president's plane as it left the NATO summit.
The Secret Service transferred Trump to a smaller C-32A military aircraft. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth joined him. The press pool and several White House staff stayed on the original Air Force One – unaware the president was gone, unaware their plane was now the decoy.
When journalists figured it out, the outrage machine fired up immediately.
Bill O'Reilly wasn't having it.
He joined NewsNation's Katie Pavlich and delivered a direct verdict on every reporter treating this as a scandal.
"They're just fools," O'Reilly said. "They don't know how it works. They don't care how it works. All they wanna do is bash Trump all day, every day."
A security team protecting the president from a missile threat does not hold a press conference to announce the route change.
"You have to protect the president of the United States," O'Reilly said. "You have to."
Pavlich added that cabinet officials were on the same plane as the journalists – and that traveling with the president has always carried risk.
"That's the job you sign up for," she said. "They should stop whining about it."
Bill Clinton Used the Same Air Force One Decoy in Pakistan
Bill Clinton did the exact same thing in March 2000.
Clinton flew from India to Islamabad, Pakistan amid credible security threats. A decoy jet with full Air Force One markings landed in front of the media. A Secret Service agent chosen for his resemblance to Clinton stepped off the plane.
The real Clinton arrived on an unmarked executive aircraft.
Reporters on board the decoy plane didn't know what they were flying into – and the dark jokes started before takeoff.
Ronald Kessler, who has written extensively on the Secret Service, told the BBC this week that deception operations are standard procedure – not emergency improvisation.
"There's a long history of strategies to mislead anybody who might be trying to harm the president," Kessler said.
Robert McDonald, a former senior Secret Service agent who worked presidential security details and drove one of the decoy limousines during the Bush administration, confirmed it goes further than most people realize.
Every presidential motorcade runs two identical "Beast" limousines, switching positions throughout the route so nobody on the outside knows which one carries the president.
"Even in Washington, D.C., if we were heading to Andrews, those two limousines changed positions," McDonald said.
The shell game is not a Trump invention. It is not a scandal. It is Tuesday.
Secret Service Decoy Operations Have a Long History
The reporters accusing the Trump administration of endangering the press never raised the same complaint about Clinton in 2000.
George W. Bush ran decoy motorcades for years without a word from the White House press corps.
Biden's 2023 secret trip to Ukraine brought one reporter and one photographer under embargo – and nobody in the media called it a betrayal.
The outrage was never about the press being used as decoys.
The outrage is that Donald Trump did something the press didn’t like – and O'Reilly named it precisely.
Sources:
- Zachary Leeman, "'They're Just Fools!' Bill O'Reilly Unloads on Press for Bashing Trump Over Plane Switch," Mediaite, August 13, 2026.
- RedState Staff, "Trump's Air Force One 'Decoy' Fooled the Press. Good. That Was the Point," RedState, August 11, 2026.
- Susan Page, "Air Force One Has Been Used as a 'Decoy' Before: I Was There," The Hill, August 11, 2026.