Don’t look now, but there’s still no solution to the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz—and oil prices are once again over $110 a barrel, nearly as high as they’ve been since the war in Iran began. Happy Tuesday.

Where’s Steve?

by Andrew Egger

In yesterday’s newsletter, Bill warned us all to brace for more attempts by the White House to use Saturday’s dreadful attempted mass shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to immediately press its political aims. That’s just what we saw yesterday—but perhaps not in the way we’d expected.

In the White House and on Capitol Hill, the response to the attack quickly consolidated into two demands.

The first involved Trump’s longed-for East Wing ballroom. All legal attempts to prevent its construction, the president and his Justice Department demanded, must immediately cease. For good measure, despite months of Trump insisting the project would be privately funded, some Republican lawmakers insisted Congress must now allocate hundreds of millions of dollars for its construction.

The second involved Trump’s latest TV nemesis, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel. Two nights before the attack, Kimmel had joked on his show that First Lady Melania Trump had “a glow like an expectant widow.” On Monday, both Trumps accused Kimmel of “a despicable call to violence” and demanded his immediate firing. “People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate,” Melania wrote. “It is time for ABC to take a stand.”

All this was very silly. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is an event hosted by the White House Correspondents’ Association, not the White House; it will not take place on the White House grounds whether Trump gets his ballroom or not. And Kimmel, as he insisted last night on his show, had obviously not been making a call to violence, but a silly age-gap joke about the president’s much younger third wife.¹

But set that aside. Of far greater note than these trifles is what the White House isn’t doing in the wake of the attempt—at least not so far, at least not in public.

Think back to the last big, rallying moment for the right. After the assassination last year of Charlie Kirk, Trump did some of the same things he’s doing today—right down to picking a fight with and about Kimmel. But that wasn’t all. Trump’s government also immediately pledged to launch a whole-of-government mobilization against what it described as the “domestic terrorism” of the political left.

This broad effort had a single architect and public cheerleader: Trump adviser Stephen Miller. In the days after Kirk’s killing, Miller was omnipresent on X and on cable news, where his declarations of war were sweeping, ecstatic, apocalyptic. I wrote at the time:

Last Thursday morning, less than 24 hours after the shooting, Miller tweeted out a thesis statement. “There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country,” he wrote, “which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved.” This ideology has “one unifying thread,” he added: “the insatiable thirst for destruction.” . . .

“The last message that Charlie Kirk gave me before he joined his creator in heaven was he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence,” Miller ranted. “And we are going to do that, under President Trump’s leadership. I don’t care how. It could be a RICO charge, a conspiracy charge, conspiracy against the United States, insurrection. But we are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that are fomenting riots, that are doxxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, that are committing acts of wanton violence.”

Miller made a promise: “The power of law enforcement, under President Trump’s leadership, will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”

You might have expected the latest assassination attempt of the president would have Miller back out there again, pressing his case. But we haven’t been seeing as much of Miller lately, on TV or online. (His last original tweet was more than a week ago, on April 20.) In fact, he’s gone to ground for quite some time. His one big attempt to wage total war against his perceived enemies, the ICE occupation of Minneapolis that culminated in the deaths of two protesters, proved a massive political liability. Miller found himself forced to beat a tactical retreat. He hasn’t abandoned his political goals, but—as the New York Times reported this month—he has found it prudent to let others make the pitch to a country that plainly isn’t buying what he’s trying to sell.

Miller, who remains one of Trump’s most trusted advisers, can obviously still do plenty of damage behind the scenes. But it’s interesting that now that he’s unable to lead the messaging charge himself, the White House’s response to political violence seems in some ways to have collapsed in on itself. Absent (so far) are any disciplined attempts to use the outrage over the attack to deal damage to the left. Instead, the Washington Republican response has followed the contours of the president’s own ridiculous—but far more harmless—obsessions: his personal vanity projects and grievances against one particular TV personality.

In a weird way, the whole thing shows how much better off we are today—from the point of view of the weaponization of the federal government—than we were six months ago. A government where Stephen Miller is playing hurt turns out to be far less dangerous than the alternative.