This week in the saga

On Wednesday night an army helicopter and a passenger jet meet over the Potomac and sixty-seven people die within sight of the terminal. He is at the podium by morning, and by Friday he has worked out the altitude himself and put it in a post — the helicopter was too high, by a lot, and is that really so complicated. Saturday the caves in Somalia are struck. Then the week turns to the instrument. Sunday the tariffs are signed against the two neighbours and the largest trading partner all at once, and the northern one is told what it is: not an ally, a subsidy, a country that ceases to exist as viable without American generosity and might as well become the fifty-first state. By Monday evening both neighbours have called, both have offered soldiers or money, and both have been granted a month. Nothing has been paid and nothing has been signed, but everyone now understands the sequence — the post, the deadline, the phone call, the pause — and the sequence will run all year.