The President announced Monday that Walmart is lowering prices at his administration’s request. Walmart announced, also Monday, that Walmart is lowering prices. If you are now waiting for the part where those two announcements refer to each other, I have some very relaxing news: you can stop waiting. The suspense has been resolved. The answer is nothing. The announcements exist in entirely separate universes, each one complete, each one official, each one the controlling document on the question of why prices went down — and the two universes have never met.
Now, a lesser commentator might call this a discrepancy. I prefer to call it a feat of institutional engineering. What the administration has done is invent a category of causation that leaves no fingerprints on the effect. What Walmart has done is accept credit for an outcome without specifying a cause. Together they have produced a perfect closed loop: a thing happened, two parties are pleased about it, and the official record contains exactly zero information about how.
This is, properly understood, not a contradiction. It is a new literary form. The President’s statement is the dedication page. Walmart’s statement is the book. The dedication says, “This could not have been written without me.” The book says, “Acknowledgments: none.” Both are true. Both are published. The reader is left to supply the author.
What we have here, stripped of the fanfare, is a structural claim — that a statement about a thing and a statement confirming the thing constitute the same statement, provided both parties want credit and neither party wants the other one to have it. In Washington, this passes for a press strategy. In publishing, it would be called a dispute over the cover. In a court, it would be called two different witnesses describing two different crimes that happened to leave the same body.
Walmart did not say the administration had nothing to do with it. The administration did not say Walmart was acting alone. They simply filed their paperwork in different offices, on the same day, about the same event, and allowed the official record to consist entirely of the gap between them. The prices went down. The credit went nowhere. Which, if you are keeping score, is actually the most efficient thing either party has done all year.