All these things happened within a little more than a day.
A private plane carrying Wagner Group chieftain Yevgeniy Prigozhin crashes. Video of the crash shows the plane seeming to stop in mid-air, then tumbling into a freefall.
U.S. intelligence officials say the plane was not shot down by a missile. The leading speculation is that someone placed a bomb aboard the aircraft.
At one time, Prigozhin was a confidant and close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. But Putin’s costly and murderous war in Ukraine divided the two men.
Prigozhin launched an abortive rebellion against Putin in June. Publicly, the two thugs made peace and linked arms again.
Privately, it seems, Putin decided not to let bygones be bygones.
His official statement acknowledging Prigozhin’s death spoke of the departed’s mistakes in life and expressed little sympathy for the man’s passing.
That Putin would assassinate a rival so publicly demonstrates that an already volatile part of the world stands to become even more unstable. Putin’s war in Ukraine has ground to a standstill, leaving him in the position of the man who holds a wolf by the ears.
He does not dare let go but he also cannot afford to hold on.
The fact that a man who has an arsenal of nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction at his disposal feels increasingly desperate should be a matter of grave concern.
Not long after Prigozhin’s plane fell from the sky, though, eight Republican contenders for the presidency of the United States took the stage for their first debate.
These would-be commanders-in-chief actually argued about whether the United States should continue to support Ukraine and work to contain Putin. They focused more attention on poor people crossing the border with Mexico than the mass murderer with a stable of nuclear missiles at his command.
At the same time that the Republican debate started, the platform once known as Twitter dropped an interview former Fox News host Tucker Carlson did with the man who leads the race to become the Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump.
The 46-minute interview was an exercise in both flattery and fiction, a conversation that indulged the two trust-fund-bred self-styled populists’ beliefs that the world somehow has been unfair to them.
This was not out of character for them.
Trump, of course, faces four different indictments on 91 counts, all of them stemming from the man’s inability or refusal to either speak or acknowledge the truth that he lost the 2020 presidential election.
Carlson lost his cushy job, big audience and huge paycheck with Fox because even that truth-challenged network no longer could bear the cost of his constant lying. Fox already had been forced to cough up more than $787 million in one defamation suit and likely will have to surrender even more cash in another one the network is attempting to settle.
Then, the day after Prigozhin died, the eight Republicans debated and Trump and Carlson got together to swap lies, the former president surrendered to authorities in Georgia, where he will go on trial for trying to steal the 2020 election.
Trump spent 20 minutes at the Fulton County Jail, where he was fingerprinted and given a number in the county’s criminal justice system. For the first time in U.S. history, a president had a mug shot taken.
Afterward, Trump — who cemented his fame by hosting a TV show in which contestants performed made-up tasks that enabled him to pretend to fire them — conjured up still more fantasies.
He was the victim of a grave injustice, he told the cameras and microphones.
Then, the man who tried to steal the 2020 presidential election accused those working to hold him accountable for his actions of “election interference.”
While a sizable slice of the American public continued to indulge its apparently insatiable appetite for make-believe, the process of clearing the debris from Prigozhin’s plane crash and identifying the human remains began.
And the war in Ukraine — a war about principles all Americans supposedly hold dear — grinds on, stacking up misery and grief hour after hour.
That is the thing about reality.
No matter how hard we try to deny it, it always intrudes.
It always reasserts itself.
Sometimes, all we need is a day to remind us of that.
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