On a Saturday morning in the Maryland hills, a civilian aircraft wandered into the silence that surrounds power — the restricted airspace above Camp David, where President Trump was in residence. A NORAD F-16 rose to meet it, deploying flares as a wordless warning before guiding the errant plane back to open sky. The incident, the second of its kind during this presidency, speaks to a quiet and persistent tension between the freedom of flight and the geometry of protection that democracy draws around its leaders.