This week in the saga

The last full week of the campaign is spectacle end to end. Tuesday night a woman who ran for the other side's nomination eight years ago walks out onto his stage in North Carolina and joins him; he welcomes her in three words. Friday he sits down in a room in Austin with the biggest podcast on earth and talks for three hours without a single question submitted in advance — no lectern, no lights, no crowd, just two microphones and a table. Saturday he promises a rally that under his presidency the ice cream machines will work again, and means it exactly as much as everything else. Then Sunday he takes Madison Square Garden: twenty thousand inside, the queue around the block since dawn, the rafters solid. It is the room his city would not give him for forty years, and it is full.