IRAQ/MILITARY/SOCIAL MEDIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The tweets stopped and soon the jig was up. President Donald Trump’s trip to Iraq this week, his first to a war zone as president, was supposed to be a surprise. But the White House couldn’t keep the sensitive trip a secret for long. After tweeting more than three dozen times over the last four days, Trump ceased his rapid-fire online missives on Tuesday [12-25-18] night. By WednesdaY [12-26-18], the president was nowhere to be found, without any scheduled public events. There was no uniformed Marine standing outside the West Wing, normally an obvious signal that the president is in the Oval Office. White House officials went silent. Soon, amateur aircraft watchers were tracking a Boeing VC-25, the military plane that serves as Air Force One, flying over Europe. It wasn’t the first time aviation obsessives had flagged possible signals that a president might be headed to a war zone. But the real-time tracking of Trump’s flight, paired with Trump’s Twitter disappearing act offered the strongest hint yet that he was finally making the trip.”
–Andrew Restuccia, “How Trump gave away his secret war zone trip,” Politico, December 26, 2018 5:27 pm