Donald Trump attended a NATO summit in Ankara this week, and when he boards his $400 million Air Force One to fly home, his luggage will include something that most heads of state leave behind. According to Turkish outlet T24, as reported by The Mirror US, the Secret Service brought a dedicated toilet system to Turkey for the president's use, and the waste from that toilet will be flown back to the United States with him. The exact same protocol, it turns out, is followed by Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.
Yes, This Is Real. No, We Are Not Making It Up.
Let's just sit with this for a second. The President of the United States of America, leader of the free world, commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in human history, flew a special toilet to Turkey so that he could poop into it, and is now flying that poop home.
This is not a story from The Onion. This is not a fever dream. The Mirror US is reporting this based on detailed coverage from Turkish outlet T24, which covered the logistical arrangements surrounding Trump's stay at the JW Marriott in Ankara during the NATO summit. The Secret Service, in addition to coordinating with Turkish police and hotel security, apparently also coordinated the transport of presidential fecal matter across international borders.
The entire JW Marriott was reserved exclusively for the US delegation. The hotel's electrical systems, water systems, ventilation, and fire suppression systems all received special inspections before Trump arrived. And still, despite all of that, the man brought his own toilet. Security is security, apparently, right down to the molecular level.
The Company He Keeps in This Particular Habit
Here is where it gets genuinely weird, beyond the obvious weirdness of the baseline situation. The practice of flying your own waste home is, according to The Mirror US, a protocol shared by exactly two other world leaders: Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.
For Putin, the Paris Match reported that the Russian president's Federal Protection Service collects his human waste in special bags, stored in a dedicated briefcase, which then travels back to Russia with him. This has been documented as far back as Putin's 2017 visit to France. When Putin met Trump in Alaska last year, the same protocol was reportedly in place.
For Kim Jong Un, The Chosunilbo, a South Korean news agency, reported that when Kim arrived in Singapore for his 2018 summit with Trump, he brought along an IL-76 transport plane carrying food, his bulletproof limousine, and a portable toilet. Lee Yun-keol, a former North Korean Guard Command unit member who defected to South Korea in 2005, told the Washington Post that a personal toilet follows Kim everywhere he travels. So to recap the club Trump has now joined: one active authoritarian who jails political opponents and one active authoritarian who starves his own population. Great group.
The Actual Reason, Which Is Somehow More Unsettling
To be fair, there is a legitimate intelligence rationale behind all of this. Lee Yun-keol explained it plainly to the Washington Post: "The leader's excretions contain information about his health status so they can't be left behind."
That's true. Human waste can reveal a remarkable amount of medical information, from disease markers to medication use to signs of conditions that might affect a leader's judgment or life expectancy. Foreign intelligence services have been known to go to extraordinary lengths to gather that kind of biological data. So the instinct to protect it isn't paranoid, it's just tradecraft.
The question isn't really whether the security concern is legitimate. The question is how we got to a place where the 47th president of the United States is running the same operational security playbook as the two most infamous autocrats on the planet, and nobody in his orbit seems to find that optic even slightly worth remarking on.
Meanwhile, the NATO Summit Itself
Trump was in Ankara for a NATO summit, traveling with what The Mirror US describes as a delegation of roughly 1,400 people, including politicians, diplomats, military officials, and CIA personnel. The US sent the largest delegation of any member nation.
The summit took place as the alliance continues grappling with questions about American commitment to collective defense, questions Trump himself has spent a decade stoking by suggesting repeatedly that NATO members who don't meet defense spending targets don't deserve US protection. So the optics of arriving to a NATO summit in a $400 million plane, with 1,400 people in tow, having reserved an entire luxury hotel, while also managing a dedicated excrement transport operation, are a lot.
He was in Turkey to reassure American allies. Whether allies find it reassuring that the American president trusts their country enough to summit there but not enough to leave a biological sample is, diplomatically speaking, a question for the analysts.
The Dingo Take
Look, there's a version of this story where you extend some charity and say: fine, this is a reasonable security precaution, intelligence agencies do strange things, let's not make it weird. But we are way past that version of this story, because the story already made it weird. The president of the United States is now, demonstrably, operating his bowel movements on the same classified-asset model as the two leaders he is most frequently and unfavorably compared to. That's just what happened.
The Putin parallel in particular should be getting more attention than it is. When two veteran French investigative journalists documented Putin's waste-collection protocol in Paris Match, it was treated as a chilling portrait of a paranoid autocrat who trusts no one and controls everything. When Trump does the identical thing, we are apparently supposed to treat it as a fun travel quirk. It is not a fun travel quirk. It is the same behavior, from a president who has spent the better part of two years openly admiring Putin's governing style.
The $400 million plane is wild. The 1,400-person delegation is wild. The fully reserved five-star hotel with its systems inspected down to the fire sprinklers is wild. But somehow the detail that will stick, the one that is going to travel across group chats and dinner tables for weeks, is that Donald Trump flew his own poop home from Turkey. Some stories write themselves. This one really, really did.
