Trump declares Qatar's gifted jet 'safe to fly' minutes after its emergency slide deploys on the tarmac

As it ran on the front

On September 4th, the Boeing 747 gifted to the country by Qatar was reported, plainly, as a plane the president was expected to fly overseas to Ireland despite "lingering questions about the aircraft's security capabilities." That sentence sat there for five days, unresolved, the way these sentences do, until Wednesday, when the aircraft answered it itself: an emergency slide deployed onto the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews before President Trump's departure for the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, inflating out of the door opposite the one he normally boards through.

Reporters standing on the tarmac noticed an inflatable slide where a door should be and asked about it. The president said they were doing a check on the slide. Fair enough — a check is a normal thing to run, on a plane, before a president gets on it. Then he said the plane was safe to fly, which is also a normal thing to say, and safe to fly is exactly what I am prepared to defend at length, because the deployment of an emergency slide is itself proof the safety system engaged precisely as engineered, catching a — no. It didn't catch anything. It deployed because something was wrong enough to deploy it. That's not the system working. That's the system's alarm going off.…