This week in the saga

Friday night, eleven o'clock, somewhere over the country: he writes that he has been on a mission since the beginning and will never quit, never bend, never break, never yield, not even in the face of death itself. Eleven minutes later he writes to his father, dead twenty-five years, and wishes him a happy birthday. On Saturday he holds a rally in the California desert, in a county his party has not carried in a generation, and afterwards puts the number at a hundred thousand. Then Monday, in a hot hall outside Philadelphia, two people faint in the crowd twenty minutes apart. He calls for the doctors, and then he stops taking questions altogether and asks for music instead. The moderator waits. The playlist runs. For thirty-nine minutes the candidate for president stands on the stage in front of a full room and sways to his own songs, and nobody leaves.