WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described an awkward episode aboard Air Force One in which he and other senior officials spent roughly 90 minutes trying to decide whether a person asleep in a conference room was simply resting or in the middle of a medical emergency.
Rubio told the story on the Katie Miller Podcast. The group was returning from China when they noticed someone sleeping in a conference room on the presidential aircraft. Activity and noise continued around the person, but there was little or no response. That left the officials with a dilemma they were slow to resolve: wake the sleeper, call a doctor, or leave the person alone.
They hesitated, Rubio said, because nothing might have been wrong. The person could simply have been in an unusually deep sleep. The other possibility was harder to ignore. “If they were dead, like what do you do?” he recalled asking. Concern grew because the individual did not appear to react to surrounding stimuli, and Rubio said the breathing pattern seemed unusual.
Even so, the officials did not immediately summon a physician or try to wake the person. They kept debating how to handle it. The uncertainty ended without an emergency. “Luckily, the person was fine,” Rubio said.
He did not name the individual, and no independent account has confirmed who it was. Online, users offered their own guesses, including joking suggestions about well-known political figures. There is no evidence for those claims, and Rubio gave no indication of the person’s identity.
The anecdote drew extra notice because Rubio has already been questioned about sleep on official aircraft and in presidential meetings. At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu asked whether Rubio had ever seen President Donald Trump fall asleep during a meeting. Rubio said he had not. He described Trump as keeping an unusually demanding schedule and said the president often contacts administration officials early in the morning.
Lieu later challenged that answer, saying he had video he believed showed Trump with his eyes closed during a Cabinet meeting while Rubio was speaking. Rubio maintained that he had never personally seen the president fall asleep.
The Air Force One episode was less political. Rubio’s account was of an ordinary moment that turned unsettling because officials could not tell deep sleep from a possible medical crisis. It ended without injury, but it offered a rare look at the strange problems that can arise on the presidential plane. What started as a question of whether to wake a passenger became a long stretch of uncertainty. In the end, the person was fine, and the officials were left with a story rather than the emergency they had feared.
