Somewhere over Turkey a few weeks ago, Air Force One quietly became a different airplane. Trump switched aircraft on the way out because intelligence said Iranian proxies were targeting the new one, the modified Qatari 747 he’d been racing to get into service. Today’s Times investigation explains why that plane was worth targeting, and also why it wasn’t ready: the push to speed delivery skipped some of the security hardening a presidential aircraft is supposed to have. Costs went up as speed went up, and somewhere in that trade the armor got thinner.

It’s almost too on-the-nose: a plane built partly as a status object, bigger and sooner and more presidential than the last guy’s, ending up unable to do the one job status objects like this actually exist for, which is keeping the person inside alive. You can rush the paint job, the fuselage seal, the ceremony of rolling it out. You apparently can’t rush the parts that matter and expect them to be there when a real threat shows up. A tidy little parable about building something versus building the appearance of something, wrapped in a spectacularly expensive fuselage.

Meanwhile, a housing bill, the first major one in a generation, became law this week with nobody in particular pushing it. Not Trump, who by all accounts didn’t care. Just Congress, doing the unglamorous version of governing while everyone watched the plane. Two ways to get something built: care enormously and rush it, or not care much and let it happen slowly. This week the second one worked better.

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