Trump gives a plumbing job for stopping a 9/11 remake the government hadn't confirmed yet.

…(cont) September 30th: he attacks the captain with an axe on the Dubai-to-Tel Aviv flight. Passengers subdue him. The plane drops altitude fast enough to make the wire copy, diverts to Saudi Arabia, and he's arrested on the ground.

October 3rd: the president offers the passenger who helped stop him a plumbing job.

October 5th: NPR reports the investigation has found he meant to put the plane into Ben Gurion Airport.

October 9th and 10th: the attorney general of the United Arab Emirates says it straight out — the target was a passenger terminal at an Israeli airport, and the plan was modeled on September 11th, after years of what the paper describes, not quotes the attorney general saying, as extreme Islamist views. I want to be careful with that line, because the attorney general isn't given a pronoun anywhere I can find, so I'm going to keep calling them the attorney general, and I apologize for how that gets clunky by the fourth time through.

That's the order. Flag, flight, axe, job offer, confirmed target. I didn't move any of it around to make a point. I just put it down the way it came in.

I've got a car in the garage that's needed a fan belt since March, and when I go out to look at it — which I do, most evenings, the way some men look at a dog that isn't going to walk itself — I pass the toolbox, and in the toolbox there's a folder, because I am the kind of person who keeps a folder in a toolbox, and in the folder is a note from a mechanic, dated two years back, saying the belt should have been replaced then. I drove on it anyway. Nothing happened. Is that the whole difference between my belt and this co-pilot — that nothing happened to me? Oman Air wrote its note in 2024. What is a security-risk flag supposed to do at an airline, if not that?

Here's what sits wrong with me, and it's not the axe, and it's not even the diversion. It's the order of the next two dates. October 3rd, the job offer, blue-collar, good television, a man gets praised on camera for the thing he actually did, which was stop a plane from going somewhere terrible. October 9th and 10th, six and seven days later, the terrible place gets a name — a passenger terminal, a model from 2001. Which means the job offer went out before NPR's October 5th report, and before the UAE's October 9th finding, said what the passengers had actually been stopped from finishing. Does an offer made before the facts count as an answer to the facts? I don't think that's for me to say. I think that's for the two dates to say, side by side, which is all I've done here.

Say, before you go — the plumbing job, the one from the third. Was that before or after the record said the plan this man carried onto that aircraft was modeled on September 11th?