Of course, safety considerations are different when a president is traveling. The pilots and maintenance practices of Marine One are presumably the best that can be found, but the play-it-safe factor when carrying a president has to be larger than for other missions. So who knows whether some aviation official really said: Sorry, this is no-go.

But precisely because of those cautions and complexities, any known-universe past presidential travel plan would have a bad-weather option, or several of those, already lined up. This is the way it has worked in any White House I’ve been aware of.