This week in the saga

Tuesday morning the New York judge refuses to throw out the conviction, and the word he reaches for is psychotic. It is the last case standing — the federal ones folded three weeks ago — and it will not fold, so it gets shouted at instead. Then the week turns outward. Washington spends three days tearing up its own spending bill over a debt ceiling that comes due in June, which is to say in his term rather than the other man's, and he tells his party to call the bluff and let the shutdown start now. On Thursday morning, in six words, he says the quiet part: everybody wants to be his friend. By the weekend he has stopped bothering with domestic politics altogether and begun redrawing the map — a canal a hundred and ten years old and eight thousand dead in the building of it, a neighbour to the north demoted to a state, a hemisphere spoken about as inventory. Sunday afternoon in Phoenix, to an arena, he says it out loud for the first time from a stage: the golden age is upon us. Twenty-nine days remain.