During the early days of COVID, I found myself living in Los Angeles, the city I grew up in, back in the San Fernando Valley, the flat sprawl of suburban conformity I’d run away from at 18. The Valley had always felt oppressively normal to me; it made me, as a weirdo, self-conscious. And now I was there again, this time missing the serendipitous weirdness of a New York City subway car, in which I could be subsumed. Trying to relax, I would drive around just to drive around, the palm trees and sun exactly where they always were, the strip malls endless. But one morning, I turned the radio dial, and on came the lizardy voice of David Lynch. And he was doing the weather report.

Lynch, the bizarro-baroque filmmaker who died this week, at 78, will be remembered for being a cinematic giant, for Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive as well as the warped TV soap opera Twin Peaks and its avant-garde sequel, Twin Peaks: The Return. But what I want to recall is a much smaller gift he bestowed on me and other Angelenos when he started airing weather reports every day on the local public-radio station KCRW in May 2020, just as life under the coronavirus was becoming a long-term slog.

These dispatches were quick flashes of absurdity, many of them lasting just a bit more than a minute. The Lynchean joke of it all was, of course, that in La-La Land, the weather is pretty much always the same.

He would start off with the date and day of the week and read off the weather (in Fahrenheit and Celsius), almost invariably saying that it was “sunny” and “very still right now.” And then he would ponder for a moment: “Today, I was thinking about …” What followed was a nugget from the man’s mind, almost always the title of a song, actually something you could imagine him thinking about as he brewed a pot of black coffee that morning—Mazzy Starr’s “Fade Into You,” or “Moon River,” or the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” Sometimes he would just narrate his plans for the day, but in surreal splendor: “Day two of weekend projects, and the fun work train is rolling. I’m going to get to the dining car and get a hot coffee, maybe a cookie, maybe some popcorn. Today I’m going to be working with oil paint, tempera paint, mold-making rubber, resin, and … varnish.”

But the pièce de résistance was the last 10 seconds of each broadcast, when Lynch described what the sky would look like that afternoon: “We might have some clouds visiting until lunchtime. After that should be pure blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way,” or “It looks like these clouds will evaporate by mid-morning, and after that we’re going to be having those beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way.”

“All along the way” became a kind of catchphrase. It always made me think of The Wizard of Oz, which was a Lynch touchstone—both the glossy campiness of Glinda and the sickly green skin of the Wicked Witch. And that was it: “Everyone, have a great day!”

(His other catchphrase was “If yoouu can believe it, it’s a Friday once again!” Especially during the early pandemic, this felt like a lifeline to normal times, with a strong undernote of irony.)

[Read: David Lynch was America’s cinematic poet]

I heard these dispatches on the radio every morning on my aimless drives, but I later learned that Lynch posted videos of the reports, and in these he appears in a black shirt buttoned to the top, his shock of white hair standing straight up, and—always, always—big dark sunglasses. Mel Brooks, who gave Lynch his first major-studio directorial gig (The Elephant Man, which Brooks produced), famously once called him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.” It also seems true to say that if Mars had a weatherman, this is exactly what he would look and sound like. (Perhaps: “A blazing red sun outside, folks, but we’ll be down to –153 tonight.”)

David Lynch’s final weather report.

These daily moments of zen opened something up in me, and made the Valley seem a little less ordinary. After all, Lynch was manifesting in these reports the duality that was a hallmark of his aesthetic, a kind of excessive, pathological normalcy. It’s in his reference to many 1950s songs, his clothing and hair, the very idea of a jolly weatherman providing a tether to sunny, physical reality. And yet, the creepy, creaky edge, the excitement with which he pronounced “very still” every single day, pointed to something dreamier and much darker. It made me attuned to the freeway underpasses, brightly lit and menacing, to the sadness of the blinking neon signs on liquor stores, to the Valley’s surrounding hills, which grow shadowy and hulking at night. Listening to Lynch on the radio suddenly made me feel like I was inhabiting a noir of some sort, as if Raymond Chandler were narrating the events of my very boring and predictable COVID day of bleaching vegetables and washing masks.

There was a charm to Lynch’s weather reports. He genuinely seemed to enjoy embodying this role for a few minutes a day. And it came through. My editor told me that his then-7-year-old son thought of Lynch as his “favorite weatherman,” and it’s funny to think of a new generation encountering the director as a grandfatherly figure wishing them a good day as they opened up their laptops for remote school. Wait until they see Dennis Hopper sucking on gas in Blue Velvet.

The weather reports stopped in late 2022, just as the world attempted to return to its own version of normal—and around the time I moved back to New York. But I like to think of Lynch having grabbed that brief period to fulfill his own fantasy of messing with us all a little bit, and also providing something that he wasn’t always known for but should be: a kind of innocent joy. I know that I’m wishing him blue skies all along the way.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

This week Joe Biden delivered his farewell address to the nation, in which he warned of the looming threat of unchecked power. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss the president’s speech as well as what to expect from Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Although Biden’s administration can claim various key moments of success over the past four years, his presidency was consciously framed around defending and protecting democratic norms, McKay Coppins said last night. But after he lost his party and the White House “in a pretty dramatic fashion to usher in the return of Donald Trump,” McKay continued, “it’s going to be hard to make the case that he did what he set out to do.”

Meanwhile, Trump has vowed to take dramatic steps in the earliest days of his presidency, including mass deportations. “You’re going to see a flurry of executive orders,” Zolan Kanno-Youngs said. The administration is “reaching and trying to be creative when it comes to accomplishing” Trump’s immigration agenda.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Andrew Desiderio, a senior congressional reporter at Punchbowl News; Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent at NPR and a political contributor for ABC News; and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent for The New York Times.

Watch the full episode here.

Looking back on the four-year Donald Trump interregnum, the failure of the case against Trump for hoarding classified documents is not the most serious or influential—that would be the utter lack of accountability for Trump’s attempted overthrow of the government, including instigating the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol—but it might be the most maddening.

On his way out of office, the president removed documents that he had no right to keep, which included some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets, according to the Justice Department’s indictment. When the government asked nicely for them, he refused to give them back. When the government demanded them by force of law, he ignored it. When officials came to collect them, he allegedly sought to hide them. Though he has denied breaking any law, Trump has not really disputed most of the facts of the case. The indictment describes what must be the stupidest crimes imaginable, and he totally got away with them.

The temptation might be to write this matter off as a lesser concern, akin to the byzantine case that branded Trump a felon in New York. Apologists have noted that other officials, including Joe Biden, also mishandled classified documents. Resist the siren call of these rationalizations. The documents that Trump mishandled were full of tightly controlled information that he stored on an insecure ballroom stage and in a spare water closet. Besides, the improper handling of classified documents was a key line of attack that Trump himself used against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

[David A. Graham: Aileen Cannon is who critics feared she was]

Moreover, the charges that Trump faced weren’t about taking the documents. They were about his alleged all-out effort to avoid a lawful subpoena and defy federal law-enforcement officials. He has now named some of his defense attorneys in the case to be top officials at the Justice Department that investigated him. If Americans hadn’t already gotten so used to this sort of thing over the past decade, it would be beyond belief.

The particular process by which Trump got off is exemplary and instructive. Step one: Defy the rules without hesitation, and dare the system to stop you. Trump may not have set out to abscond with the documents; it seems to have been a matter of negligence, given that they were haphazardly stashed in boxes with newspapers and golf shirts. Trump was so intent on stealing the 2020 election, and apparently thought he had enough of a chance, that he then had to hurriedly pack up to leave.

Step two: When the system does try to stop you, brush it off. When the National Archives realized in the spring of 2021 that Trump had removed some documents, it politely requested them back. He refused. It asked again. He eventually allowed the Archives to recover some but not all. After discovering classified information in them, the Archives finally referred the matter to the Justice Department in February 2022. In May 2022, a grand jury issued a subpoena requiring Trump to return more materials. He refused, and allegedly instructed his aide Walt Nauta to move some of the boxes elsewhere at Mar-a-Lago. The next month, FBI agents visited Mar-a-Lago and collected some documents; Trump allegedly prevented them from examining boxes there. By the time the FBI conducted an unannounced search in August 2022, he appeared shocked but shouldn’t have been.

Step three: Fight the battle in public. Even though there was no dispute over whether Trump had the documents or whether they were sensitive—Trump argued, without evidence, that he was entitled to them or had declassified them—the former president used the FBI search as the central example in a narrative of unfair persecution. When the facts were unfavorable, he made up stories, claiming, for example, that the FBI agents may have been sent to kill him.

Step four: Rely on a justice system stocked with judges you appointed. Trump got very lucky when he drew Judge Aileen Cannon, an inexperienced jurist he’d appointed to the bench. First, she issued rulings restricting DOJ access to evidence; the rulings raised eyebrows and were eventually overturned by a higher court. Once charges were filed, she ran the case at molasses speed, drawing out every step; quarreled with prosecutors; and ultimately threw out the charges after ruling that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional, though other courts had repeatedly rejected similar ideas. (Trump might have gotten a less friendly judge, as he did in the federal case over the 2020-election subversion, but he can still always appeal to the Trump-stocked Supreme Court.)

[David A. Graham: The stupidest crimes imaginable]

Step five: Let other people take the fall. Once Trump won the election, Smith dismissed the charges against him, but the charges against Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, Trump employees alleged to be his hapless accomplices, remain in place. (They have also denied any wrongdoing.) This turns out to be another stroke of good luck, because the Justice Department does not plan to release Smith’s report on the Trump investigation while other charges are pending. Once Trump is in office, he can have the case against Nauta and De Oliveira dismissed or pardon them; he may also be able to permanently suppress the report.

The result: Trump will never face consequences, and the public may never learn the results of the investigation. Americans have seen other instances in which the hesitation of the Justice Department, the slowness of the justice system, and the interference of Trump-friendly judges have prevented any chance at accountability. They just may never have seen any so brazen.