This week in the saga

Seven weeks ago he set a deadline he had no power to set: the hostages come home before January 20, or there will be all hell to pay. On Wednesday at one minute past noon, five days early, he posts that there is a deal. On Sunday morning the first three walk out. On Tuesday he invents an agency to tax the rest of the world instead of the people in it, and gives it a name that is the old one with one word changed. On Friday he speaks to the chairman in the east and calls it a very good call. On Friday night the forecast comes in at nine degrees and the ceremony is moved indoors for the first time in forty years, which means the crowd he has been promising for four years will stand in an arena across town and watch a screen. On Sunday he lays a wreath at the tomb of a soldier nobody can name. And on Monday, under a dome, with his hand on his family's Bible and the flag still at half-staff for a dead president, he says thirty-five words that take fourteen seconds. Seventy-three weeks down the escalator, seventy-three weeks back up. The lion is on the throne, and Volume Seven closes here.