‘Couldn’t see chest movement’: Scared Rubio spent 90 minutes watching a man on Air Force One

WASHINGTON, DC: Amid the bizarre story of Trump secretly leaving Turkey in a plane after attending a NATO summit, Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared a similarly unsettling anecdote, revealing that he once spent more than an hour watching a man on Air Force One because he feared the passenger was dead.

Rubio, who, along with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, stayed on the larger plane while returning to the US, shared an old Air Force One story amid Trump’s security threat.

Rubio recalls tense China flight incident

During a Tuesday, Aug 11, interview on The Katie Miller Podcast, Rubio shared that he once monitored someone during a trip back to the US from China, thinking it was a corpse, as he was not sure whether the person was dead or alive.

“And for a significant period of this flight, it was debatable whether this person had passed away or not,” the 55-year-old politician said.

“I couldn’t see chest movement,” he continued. “I couldn’t establish a consistent breathing pattern in the individual. But I also didn’t want to wake them up on the one hand, or discover a dead body on the other.”

“Cause it’s embarrassing if you wake them up [and they say], ‘Oh, I was just sleeping.’ But if they were dead, like what do you do? You have a dead body on the plane ... I don’t know what the protocol for it is.”

Rubio appeared on the interview with his wife, Jeanette. The Secretary continued talking about what made him think that the person was dead and told the host that bouts of “noise” and the lights being on worried him because “this person was not responding to any of the stimulus.”

“You could see every now and then that there was like, maybe a breath, but I don’t know how you sustain life at that pace of respiration,” he said.

Rubio was then asked by his wife, Jeanette, if he  kept tabs on the person throughout the flight. To which Rubio replied that he kept checking on the person so that, if the man was actually dead, Rubio could say he had noticed the situation and had been monitoring him.

Rubio returned in larger plane, as Trump left Turkey in smaller one

Rubio revisited the old Air Force One story as the unsettling details of Trump leaving Turkey in a secret plane early in July continue to emerge.

President Donald Trump left Turkey last month on a smaller plane with several close aides after quietly leaving the larger aircraft. Several Cabinet members, however, remained on the larger Air Force One, according to a person familiar with the arrangements.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also traveled with the president on the smaller C-32A that took off from Ankara, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller stayed on the larger plane.