This week in the saga

The oath was yesterday. Twenty-eight minutes past midnight, with the inaugural balls barely emptied, the first post of the second term goes out — the first day is not over yet — and a thousand appointees learn by broadcast that they no longer work here, four of them named in a sentence that ends with the two words from the television show. This is the grammar the whole term will use. Nothing is proposed; things are announced, at odd hours, already done. By Friday he has a name for the first four days: the most historic 100 hours in American history. On Sunday a South American president refuses to let two deportation flights land, and inside a single day discovers what the new instrument is — tariffs, visas, sanctions, all of it drafted before dinner — and folds before the planes have refuelled. Monday night the Army opens the taps in California and the water is a press release. Between them, on Wednesday morning, the one post that is not an order at all: a long, almost fond paragraph about Russia, sixty million dead in a war eighty years gone, and a favour he intends to do a man he has always liked.