This week in the saga

Tuesday is the hundredth day and the feed becomes a chorus: forty posts in a single afternoon, all of them other people saying it was the most consequential hundred days in modern history, reposted by the man they are about it. Wednesday morning the quarter's growth number comes in negative for the first time in three years, and by a quarter past nine it belongs to somebody else — this is the previous administration's stock market, and the boom is still coming, be patient. In between, the small decrees keep arriving at the rate of one a day, each one a sentence long and each one final: two national holidays renamed for victories nobody had thought to celebrate, a university's tax status revoked in twelve words, a prison island in a cold bay ordered rebuilt because it would serve as a symbol, a hundred percent tariff on foreign films because a movie is a national security threat now. None of these go through anybody. That is the point of them.