This week in the saga

Wednesday he takes a chair on a convention stage in Chicago in front of a room of Black journalists, and the questioning turns into a duel in the first sixty seconds — he answers a question about respect by asking who she was before this year. By Thursday morning the fight has become a joke about a photograph, thanked with perfect courtesy. Then two nights of hard news: a prisoner swap with the East he is not told the terms of, and a debate he agrees to on his own network, on his own ground, with a full arena in it — because the one he had was made against a man who no longer exists. And on Monday the markets open and fall out from under everybody at once. Tokyo first, then everything else. He is awake for it, counting the wreckage before the country does.