This week in the saga

At twenty to seven on Thursday morning, after an all-night session and two members voting present, the bill passes the House by one vote. It is a thousand pages, it carries the tax cuts and the border money and the funding for a missile shield he has been posting about as an object, and it exists because he spent Tuesday and Wednesday in a room telling holdouts what would happen to them if they were the one. He announces it before the sun is properly up. By Friday morning the same instrument is pointed at Europe — fifty percent, starting June first, because the discussions are going nowhere — and by Sunday evening von der Leyen has telephoned to ask for six more weeks and he has granted them, which he describes as his privilege. Between those two things, on Sunday night, comes the crack in the register that has held all spring: the man in Moscow, whom he has liked and defended for a decade, has gone absolutely crazy. On Monday morning he posts a Memorial Day greeting in capital letters that runs three hundred words and is addressed, at length, to the people he hates.