Pentagon's $2.9 billion submarine deal arrives with a Ravens cornerback, the third such guest star this fall.

…(cont) This is not the first cameo of the fall. On September 1, the White House credited itself with a "Trump Effect" on a $1 billion Rolls-Royce investment in Indianapolis defense manufacturing, an investment the company's own account says it launched in 2015, a decade-long build the White House pressed into service as a one-week headline. On October 1, Dennis Rodman joined the president in Texas ahead of a rally, as the administration prepared to renew diplomacy with Rodman's friend Kim Jong Un. On October 6, Humphrey did the same work at Sparrows Point that Rodman did in Texas and Rolls-Royce did in Indianapolis: he stood where the cameras already were, so the cameras had somewhere to point besides the contract.

Three events, three dollar figures, one arrangement: a famous face beside the number, so the number gets read off instead of added up. The Rolls-Royce figure cost the public nothing new — it is a decade-long stretch of a British company's own capital, relabeled for a press release. The difference between those two kinds of "investment" does not show up in the photograph. It shows up afterward, in whose budget carries the number: the Pentagon's, this time, at $2.9 billion, for a two-million-square-foot building a cornerback will never set foot inside.

The gap this week is not that no one has ever done this. It is that three such gaps, in five weeks, have come dressed the same way: a guest, a number, and a press pool trained on the guest instead of the ledger behind him.