This week in the saga

Wednesday is the flood: a dozen appointments posted between breakfast and bedtime — trade, the army, space, the tax collector, the antitrust office, a crypto czar invented out of nothing. When a paper reports that one pick withdrew, he corrects the record with the only edit that matters to him: the man did not pull out, he was pulled. On Thursday morning a currency nobody's government issues crosses a hundred thousand dollars and he takes the credit in three exclamation marks and two words. On Thursday night a network hands him an award and he thanks it politely. On Saturday he is in Paris for the reopening of a cathedral that burned five years ago, seated among presidents and kings under new stone, and for ninety minutes the loudest man in the world is quiet in a cold church. And at two o'clock on Sunday morning, in the dark, in a country he has never governed and will govern in six weeks, a dynasty ends: the strongman is gone, his protector busy dying in another war. He writes it down like a man reading a scoreboard.