This week in the saga

Seven days after the count, the road south to Florida becomes the only road there is. On Tuesday alone he names eight men before dinner — a national security adviser, an ambassador, a Middle East envoy, a White House counsel, a spy chief, a defense secretary, a homeland secretary, and a government-efficiency department invented on the spot and handed to the richest man alive. The announcements land like a tournament bracket being filled in live, one name every twenty minutes, each one arriving as a paragraph of praise. On Wednesday a young Florida congressman is nominated to run the department that spent four years hunting him. On Thursday the country's most famous banker is thanked warmly, in public, for outstanding service to the Country, and told in the same sentence that he will not be invited. That is the whole shape of the week: a door held open, a door held shut, and a queue in the corridor that does not know which one it is standing in. Saturday he flies to a fight in the arena he filled three weeks earlier and the room comes up out of its seats. Sunday night he adds it up in four sentences. Sixty-four days remain.