What do we call it when a quarterly earnings report is the only good news on a Thursday, and the room agrees, by unspoken vote, that it counts?
I was at Eliza’s. She had moved the dinner up by an hour because the lobbyist — bipartisan, as he insists on being described, though I have never seen a check of his go anywhere but one direction — wanted to be home for the call. Not the conference call. The earnings call. He arrived with the number already memorized and a posture I last saw on a man whose biopsy came back clean.
Eleven cents above forecast. He said it twice. He said it the way my father used to say the score of a Notre Dame game in a year Notre Dame did not deserve to win one. Someone — I think it was the deputy something at Treasury, the one who keeps a vape in a leather sleeve — said “Thank God,” and meant it, and nobody at the table corrected him, because by then the television above the bar had been muted for forty minutes and we all knew why.
On the muted television: the map of Iran, which has begun to require its own chyron font. A B-roll of a Caracas tarmac that no one would explain. A weather graphic for the storm that has now killed enough people to qualify, in a less distracted country, as the lead. And beneath all of it, in green, a ticker, and on the ticker the number, and around the number a small circle of adults raising a glass.
The lobbyist gave the speech. You have heard the speech. It is the one about fundamentals. The fundamentals are strong, he said, which is the sentence Americans now use when they would like to stop describing what they can actually see. The fundamentals were strong in September, and in November, and were strong, I am told, the morning the boats went down. The fundamentals are a kind of weather you can choose.
My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and is the only person at any of these tables who reads the actual filings, asked whether the eleven cents had anything to do with the layoffs in November. The lobbyist examined his cufflink. Eliza asked if anyone wanted more wine. The deputy something said the layoffs were already “in the print,” which is a phrase I had never heard used about human beings before, and which I would prefer not to hear used that way again.
Here is what I keep getting stuck on. The administration announced new tariffs Thursday morning. An American carrier group is doing whatever it is doing in a body of water we are not supposed to ask about. A man we spent a decade calling a dictator is in a cell somewhere, or a plane, or a footnote — the cable producers cannot decide. And the consensus achievement of the day, the one event the assembled grown-ups of Washington felt comfortable celebrating in mixed company, was that a single firm in Cupertino sold slightly more of a thing than a group of analysts in Midtown had guessed it would.
We have grown very good, in this town, at deciding what is allowed to count as news. The number counts. The map does not. The print counts. The people in the print do not. The fundamentals are strong because we have agreed, around a table set for ten, to define the fundamentals as whatever is currently green.
I left before dessert. Eliza walked me to the door and said, the way she always says, “Margaret, please.” She meant the column. She meant don’t. I told her I wouldn’t name anyone, which is true, and which is also the smallest favor I have ever done a room.
The lobbyist took an Uber home in time for the call. He told me, on the way out, that the quarter had been a great quarter. I asked him for whom. He said: for the quarter.