This week in the saga

The duel stops being an argument this week and starts being arithmetic. On Tuesday morning the first ballots go out across Pennsylvania and the thing everyone has been shouting about becomes paper in envelopes in a county mailroom — sixty-four days of campaign left and the counting has already begun. He posts three words about it and moves on. Wednesday night he is awake with a different story: the bureau says the other kingdom's hackers stole his campaign's papers and mailed them to her side, and by morning he has given it a name that rhymes with the last hoax. Friday at eighteen minutes past eleven he tells the country that anyone voting illegally goes to jail; two minutes later he notes, mildly, that a song about him has gone to number one across all charts, and calls it an unexpected honor. Saturday he takes Wilmington. Just after midnight, the field emptied and the lights coming down, he thanks North Carolina.