This week in the saga

The first rally of the year, in the Arizona desert, and the advisory for it lists five networks that will carry him live — none of them his own. The crowd is enormous and the machinery around it is borrowed. Two other things land the same week and both of them go his way without him: a congressman who voted for the second impeachment announces he will not stand again, which earns four words on the way to the stage, and the Supreme Court strikes down the vaccine mandate. The week's clearest sentence is a refusal rather than a demand — a sitting governor is being pushed to run for the Senate, and the exile says the endorsement will never come. He cannot appoint anybody. He can still decide who is finished.