This week in the saga

Tuesday a Manhattan judge rules, before any trial begins, that the empire's numbers were fiction — fraud as a finding of fact, the business licenses suddenly hanging by a thread. He answers with the disclaimer clause and the net worth he insists is bigger than any statement ever claimed. Wednesday he skips the second debate for an autoworkers' crowd in Michigan and grades his absent rivals like a schoolmaster. And on Monday, the trial's first morning, he does the thing nobody required of him: he goes. Down the courthouse hallway, past the cameras, into the front row — and the hallway becomes the new rally stage. Witch hunt, he tells the lenses. The courtroom and the campaign are now the same room.