The great escape
Ya running and ya running
And ya running away
Ya running and ya running
And ya running away
Ya running and ya running
And ya running away
Ya running and ya running
But ya can’t run away from yourself
Could ya run away from yourself?
Can you run away from yourself?
Can’t run away from yourself
Can’t run away from yourself
Yeah from yourself
You must have done somethin’
Somethin’ somethin’ somethin’
Somethin’ ya don’t want nobody to know about
Ya must have, Lord, somethin’ wrong,
What ya must have done, ya must have done somethin’ wrong
Why you can’t find where you belong?
“Running Away,” Bob Marley & The Wailers
There are images that define an age.
Ours is a catering truck crossing a Turkish tarmac with the president of the United States hidden inside.
Presidents have used deception before. Franklin Roosevelt did it magnificently.
In August 1941, as Nazi tyranny consumed Europe, Roosevelt boarded the presidential yacht Potomac for an ordinary cruise, then slipped away. The yacht continued without him, while he transferred in secret to the heavy cruiser USS Augusta, steaming toward Placentia Bay, Newfoundland.
There, aboard HMS Prince of Wales, Winston Churchill approached.
Roosevelt on an American cruiser. Churchill on a British battleship. Two leaders converging in secrecy across the North Atlantic, while Hitler dominated Europe.
Secrecy protected purpose. Roosevelt was moving toward danger, responsibility, and history.
On August 10, they met aboard Prince of Wales. Sailors gathered beneath the guns for a service, singing “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.”
From that meeting came the Atlantic Charter: self-determination, economic cooperation, freedom of the seas, freedom from fear and want, collective security, and the defeat of Nazi tyranny.
Roosevelt understood what Donald Trump does not: the presidency is not property. It is a trust.
Power is not decoration. Strength is not swagger. Courage is not cruelty. The office belongs to the American people, and is held only in stewardship.
Trump has spent a decade confusing wealth with worth, boasting with strength, intimidation with courage, and self-glorification with national greatness. Everything must be enormous, gilded, and centered on him.
Then came the Qatari airplane — a lavish Boeing 747-8 offered for presidential use, raising constitutional and security concerns.
Trump saw a palace — of course he did. It fit the aesthetic of a presidency built on spectacle.
Then came crisis. After striking Iran and declaring obliteration, the supposedly destroyed enemy posed a threat serious enough that the president was secretly removed from Air Force One in Turkey.
The aircraft remained as a decoy. Officials stayed aboard.
Donald Trump disappeared.
The instruction was simple:
Mr. President, we are taking you off Air Force One.
Mr. President, we are placing you in a catering vehicle.
Mr. President, we are moving you across the tarmac to another aircraft.
At that moment, reverence for the office should have recoiled.
Instead, he got in.
The issue is not fear. Fear is human. Nor is prudence cowardice. The Secret Service exists for protection.
The issue is the gap between performance and reality. Between swagger and vulnerability, declared victory and hidden retreat, gilded aircraft and a catering truck.
An old ghost shadows this scene.
J. Bruce Ismay survived the Titanic, and was falsely accused of disguising himself to escape in a lifeboat. The story was untrue, but it endured because it captured a deeper contempt: the powerful man hiding, while others remain exposed.
Ismay lived under a caricature he did not earn.
Trump walked into one he did.
No disguise was needed. Only a catering truck.
The degradation should have shocked the country. Instead, standards have eroded through repetition — each vulgarity absorbed, each humiliation normalized.
That is how institutions decay.
The presidency once rested on a simple principle: the office is permanent, and the occupant temporary.
Washington relinquished power. Lincoln preserved the Union. Roosevelt led through depression and war.
Trump reverses the logic. The office becomes an instrument of self-enlargement.
Even religion has been drawn into the spectacle, far from the humility of Roosevelt and Churchill aboard Prince of Wales, where faith meant duty, sacrifice, and restraint before power.
Roosevelt did not live to see victory. He died in April 1945, weeks before Germany’s surrender, as the postwar order he helped shape was still forming.
Soon after, delegates gathered in San Francisco, and then beneath the redwoods at Muir Woods to honor him.
No gold. No monument to himself. Only a world standing beneath ancient trees, dwarfed by time and nature, remembering a leader who had helped save it.
The world was saved — imperfectly, at immense cost, and only temporarily.
Nothing stays saved. Civilization is always on loan.
That is why the catering truck matters.
Roosevelt moved in secret toward Churchill and history.
Trump moved in secret into concealment from danger.
One deception served a mission. The other concealed a man.
One reflects the possibility of presidential greatness. The other its erosion.
Strip away the gold, the spectacle, the flags, the branding. What remains is the measure of decline.
And one final question lingers: who was the Turkish airline worker who cleaned the trace of that moment from the floor of the catering truck?
Perhaps one day their portrait will hang at Mar-a-Lago.
The fact that he left the press and other aides and staff on the "targeted" plane speaks volumes for
Captain Chicken. He's such a worthless piece of trash.
The pretense is all Trump. He HAS to "look" good!
We all know better. Hopefully, some people in the country are starting to figure it out as well.
I never knew about the Muir Woods honor for Roosevelt. History can teach us so much.