When the state ghosted its own passengers to evade an international threat, it engaged in a toxic trauma-dumping of national security risk.
SnarkWire's Mx. Avery Brookstone returns to the catering-truck discourse to unpack the profound boundary violations experienced by the aides and reporters left aboard Air Force One. To prevent future aeronautical gaslighting, we must mandate trauma-informed consent protocols for all geopolitical decoys.
As we continue to unpack the profound systemic resonance of last month’s executive transit incident—in which the former President was spirited onto a catering truck to evade a credible international threat, while over a hundred aides and journalists were flown to Britain as unwitting decoys—much of our discourse has rightly centered the marginalized vehicles of statecraft. I have previously written on this platform about the decolonial potential of the catering truck as an instrument of transit justice, and the vital promotion of the galley loader to an arbiter of geopolitical safety.
I want to hold space for that. But we must also turn our empathetic gaze toward the sky, and acknowledge the profound interpersonal boundary violations that occurred at 30,000 feet.
When the security state utilizes over a hundred individuals as a fleshy, airborne misdirection tactic, it engages in what I can only describe as Aeronautical Gaslighting. The aides, officials, and reporters aboard the original jet were denied their fundamental right to enthusiastic consent. They were non-consensually drafted into a toxic human-shield dynamic, their lived experiences subordinated to the asymmetrical risk-sharing preferences of the national security apparatus.
The Lived Experience of Diversionary Flight Paths
We need to ask ourselves: whose trauma is being prioritized in our airspace? By secretly removing the primary target and allowing the decoys to continue their transatlantic journey under false pretenses, the state modeled a deeply avoidant attachment style. They chose to ghost the passengers rather than engaging in a difficult but necessary dialogue about impending ballistic threats.
"It is a classic manifestation of coercive decoy-craft," says Dr. Oona Vervain, Chair of the Working Group on Trauma-Informed Diversionary Tactics at the Institute for Somatic Geopolitics. "To use a collective—in this case, freelance journalists and underpaid political staffers—as a diversionary sponge for geopolitical animus is deeply problematic. There was no pre-flight check-in. There was no continuous consent protocol. They were just flown over the Atlantic, completely alienated from the labor of their own endangerment."
Furthermore, we must acknowledge the uncompensated emotional labor extracted from the flight crew. To serve beverages while being unknowingly embedded within a military ruse forces service workers to mask their authentic somatic responses to international peril. True progressive statecraft requires an intersectional approach to threat mitigation. If a foreign power is threatening an aircraft, the burden of being a decoy must be distributed equitably, ideally prioritizing those with the most systemic privilege rather than those trapped in the aft press cabin.
A Framework for Enthusiastic Decoy Consent
This brings us to the urgent need for structural reform within the protective protocols of the United States. Critics and lawmakers have called for congressional briefings to understand why the press and public were misled. But a briefing is merely a punitive, patriarchal mechanism. What we actually need is a restorative accreditation regime.
Brampton Quell, Director of the Center for Geopolitical Boundary-Setting, has recently published a white paper proposing the Decoy Empowerment and Consent Optimization (DECO) framework.
"When an intelligence agency detects a credible threat, their first response should not be unilateral evasion," Quell explains. "Their first response must be to gather all stakeholders in a brave space—perhaps the executive lounge—and use 'I' statements to articulate the threat landscape. Only after every passenger has affirmatively opted-in to the 'Decoy Journey' can the flight proceed."
According to the DECO framework, passengers would be provided with colored lanyards indicating their comfort level with being targeted by foreign adversaries. A green lanyard indicates enthusiastic consent to human-shielding; yellow means they are open to being a secondary target but need regular emotional check-ins; red means their boundaries are strictly closed to incoming ordnance.
This is not merely about safety; it is about autonomy. The current paradigm, wherein officials whisk the principal away in a food-service vehicle and leave the collective to absorb the psychological weight of potential interception, is emotionally toxic. It denies the collective the opportunity to process the threat somatically.
Toward Restorative Threat Processing
Ultimately, we cannot dismantle the violent hierarchies of executive protection without addressing the root causes of the threat itself. If we are to move beyond these cycles of harm, we must escalate our commitment to radical empathy.
The next time intelligence intercepts a plot, we must not flee. We must not hide in catering trucks, no matter how locally sourced their provisions may be. Instead, we must convene a restorative justice circle on the tarmac. We must invite the principal, the unwitting decoys, and the foreign adversaries themselves to sit together, pass the talking stick, and share their lived experiences of international tension. Only when the threat actors feel truly seen and validated can we begin to co-create a flight plan that respects everyone’s boundaries.
Until then, every decoy flight is just another trauma-dump on the collective soul of the electorate.
