When did trade policy become something we announce the way other countries announce cabinet reshuffles — on a Thursday, before lunch, with the air of a man clearing his throat?
I was at Eliza’s on Tuesday. She had done the lamb again, because Eliza has decided the lamb is her contribution to civilization, and a small television in the kitchen was muted on a cable channel that runs the same chyron in three different fonts. Somewhere between the second pour and the cheese, the chyron changed. New tariff measures. Key trading partners. The phrase “key trading partners” doing the work it always does, which is none.
The bipartisan lobbyist was there. I will not name him because he has asked me not to and because, in his line of work, the not-naming is the service. He examined his cufflink the way he always examines his cufflink when an administration he privately advises has done something he will later be paid to explain. “It’s a posture,” he said, of the tariffs. He said it the way a priest says “it’s a mystery.”
I asked what we were tariffing this week. Someone at the end of the table said olive oil, with the certainty of a man who had just placed a large order. Someone else said semiconductors, which is what people in Georgetown say when they don’t know. My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and therefore knows what a permanent record looks like, said nothing, and ate.
This is, I am told, the fourth round of new tariff measures this year. I am told this by a podcast my nephew recommends, hosted by two men who agree with each other for ninety minutes at a time. The hosts are confident the tariffs are working. They are also confident the tariffs are not really tariffs. They are, the hosts explain, leverage. Everything is leverage now. The grocery bill is leverage. The Christmas tree is leverage. The fact that Eliza’s olive oil order from Puglia has been “processing” for nineteen days is, I suppose, leverage too.
An economist I know — she runs a research desk at one of the big consultancies, the kind that issues a quarterly note nobody reads and a private memo everybody does — told me last month that the measures don’t really change the numbers. They change the headline. The numbers, she said, were already accounted for in November. The headline is for December. January will require its own headline. This is, she said, a calendar, not a policy.
What unsettled me at Eliza’s was not the announcement, which by Tuesday had not yet arrived but which everyone knew was arriving, the way one knows a relative is arriving from the airport. What unsettled me was the conversation that followed. Nobody at the table was for the tariffs. Nobody was against them. Everyone was, instead, “watching how it plays.” A senator’s wife, a former trade negotiator, two reporters, the lobbyist, a man from the Hill whose title I have never quite caught — and not one of them said the thing. Not one of them said: this is theater, and the audience is paying for the tickets at the register.
I said it. Eliza said, “Margaret, please.” The lobbyist examined the other cufflink. Judy passed the salt.
I am told this is what civic adulthood looks like now: the careful absence of opinion among people whose entire professional lives are built on having one. The tariffs will pass. The next round will be announced before the inauguration. The hosts of the podcast will explain it, and the economist will revise her numbers, and the lobbyist will buy a third cufflink, and somewhere in Puglia a man with an oil press will wonder, briefly, what he did.
The lamb, in the end, was excellent. We called it the lamb course, and we asked for the recipe.