This week in the saga

He opens a new front against the spy chiefs, stripping a former intelligence director's clearance and branding him the worst in the agency's history. The palace turns on itself as a cast-out aide becomes a public enemy and he savages her with one of his cruelest lines. He gives the press a battlefield title — not merely fake, but the opposition party itself — and still insists he is winning. The war pauses only for a death: the queen of soul is gone, and he calls her a great woman with a gift from God. Then he casts the whole investigation as a witch trial reborn, a persecutor beside whom history's great inquisitor looks like a child — while in Virginia, the jury is almost ready.