Hello everyone. Welcome back and get ready for another important week. We have some big stories today. But the most impactful is that Stephen Miller - yes, THAT Stephen Miller is on the hot seat with Trump and has already lost major sway in the White House. We also learned that Trump is fuming over Cuba’s resilience and lashed out at Iranian leaders over their latest ceasefire proposal. And finally, an update on the hantavirus with 18 Americans in quarantine.
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Ok, Let’s get to it.
1. Stephen Miller Is On The Hot Seat.
The Atlantic reports that Stephen Miller is seeing his influence in the White House rapidly diminish. Trump has dismantled the roving Border Patrol strike forces that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller designed, and has handed control of the deportation program back to career law enforcement officials. This is the most significant internal retreat by the President on his own immigration agenda since taking office.
Miller was the architect of Trump’s second-term immigration agenda. He spent the first year of the administration building the most aggressive enforcement model in modern American history — mass workplace raids, Border Patrol strike forces, the targeting of long-settled families. Trump signed off on all of it.
The political reality caught up to Miller in stages. Trump’s approval rating on immigration, his strongest issue throughout the 2024 campaign, collapsed. The fatal shootings of two American citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, by federal agents during the Minneapolis raids in January made the political damage impossible to ignore. Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March. Career officials are now running the operation Miller designed.
The pattern began to emerge months ago. Back in January, after the U.S. captured Maduro in Caracas, reporters started asking Miller what he was actually doing inside the administration. Watch what he said when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pressed him on it:
This is what an internal political retreat looks like in real time. White House insiders insist Miller’s job is not in jeopardy and that he remains a top adviser, but the policy levers are being pulled out of his hands one at a time. The administration is keeping the rhetoric and dialing back the operation, because the operation was costing them the midterms.
Immigration is still expected to be central to Trump’s midterm messaging, but the gap between what Miller wants and what Trump’s political team will allow is now visible. Whether Miller accepts that quietly or pushes back publicly is the next question. He has not historically been someone who accepts being sidelined quietly, but Miller is the classic political survivor.
2. Trump Is Furious That Cuba Hasn’t Collapsed Yet. Now We All Have To Hope He Doesn’t Do Something Crazy.
President Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with the Cuban government’s resilience under months of U.S. economic pressure. He has been pressing his advisers about why his administration’s efforts to topple the regime have not yet produced results, NBC News reported this morning.
The frustration follows a year of escalating American pressure on Cuba. In January, the U.S. military captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in an early-morning operation in Caracas, which cut off Cuba’s primary oil supplier. Trump began publicly predicting Cuba would “fall of its own volition.”
In March, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office what he thinks his options really are:
Trump has used military force to remove two foreign leaders in five months, one captured and one killed. Cuba is the third country on the list. U.S. officials internally believe the regime could collapse by the end of this year, but Trump considers that too slow. The administration has already begun exploring federal criminal charges against Cuban officials, the same legal playbook used against Maduro. There is no clean version of what happens if the President decides economic pressure is no longer fast enough.
Cuba has already had three nationwide blackouts since March. UN experts have called the U.S. fuel blockade a “serious violation of international law.” The Cuban government has said it is willing to talk about anything except changing its government. Trump has indicated nothing else is on the table.
We are seeing in Iran the ramifications of poorly planned efforts at regime change. Let us pray Trump’s ego and impulsiveness don’t pull us into another debacle in the Caribbean.
3. The Iran War Is Closer to Restarting Than Ending.
President Trump rejected Iran’s response to the latest U.S. ceasefire proposal, posting on Truth Social that the offer was “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!” and accusing Tehran of “playing games with the United States, and the rest of the World.”
The U.S. sent Iran a 14-point proposal last week through Pakistani mediators. The deal would have required Iran to halt uranium enrichment for 12 years, hand over its 60-percent enriched stockpile, and reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days. In return, the U.S. would lift sanctions, unfreeze Iranian assets, and end the naval blockade. Iran came back with a counter-proposal over the weekend. Trump rejected it within hours, on Truth Social. Here’s Trump this morning:
This is the most fragile the ceasefire has been since it was reached on April 8. Both sides are dug in on the nuclear question, which Trump has called his red line and Iran has called non-negotiable. Netanyahu called an emergency security meeting in Jerusalem this morning, just hours after Trump’s post. His office signaled to Israeli media that “the war is not over.” Meanwhile, the U.N. warned today that tens of millions of people could face famine if fertilizer shipments do not get through the Strait of Hormuz in the next few weeks. This has never been just an oil story.
Watch what Pakistan does next, because Pakistan is the only reason these two parties are still talking. Watch Israel, because Netanyahu has been waiting for a reason to resume operations in Lebanon since the ceasefire was announced. And watch CENTCOM, which announced this morning it has redirected 62 commercial ships and disabled four since the blockade went into effect on April 13.
The CIA told the White House last week that Iran can survive this blockade for months. Iran is signaling it would rather starve the global south than concede on enrichment. And the leader of the free world is conducting the most dangerous negotiation of his presidency in all caps.
4. The Hantavirus Cruise Ship Just Docked in Spain. 18 Americans Are Now in Quarantine in Nebraska.
The MV Hondius finally docked in Spain on Sunday, ending two weeks at sea, and 18 Americans from the ship landed in Omaha early Monday morning, where they have been admitted to the only federally funded quarantine unit in the country.
Fifteen of the Americans are in the quarantine unit, which works more like a hotel for people who may have been exposed. One American, who tested positive, is in the biocontainment unit next door. That is the same wing that took in Ebola patients in 2014 and the first COVID-19 patients in 2020. Two more Americans are being monitored elsewhere. At a press conference this morning, the Assistant Secretary for Health, Dr. Brian Christine, told the country the risk to the public is, in his words, “very, very low.”
To be incredibly clear: the Andes variant of hantavirus does not spread the way COVID did. It takes prolonged, close contact with someone who is already showing symptoms. The average American is not going to catch this. But “low risk” is not the same thing as “contained.” This virus is now in five countries on three continents. Three people are dead. Contact tracers are trying to find 90 people who shared a single flight from Saint Helena to Johannesburg with a confirmed case. Another 30 passengers got off the ship at earlier ports and went home to places we have not yet heard about. The outbreak is being tracked. It is not over.
Watch the next two weeks, because the Nebraska quarantine unit has 20 rooms and one of them is already taken by a confirmed case. Watch Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Singapore, where new infections have already shown up in people who disembarked earlier. And watch how this story gets covered, because the country that voluntarily walked out of the World Health Organization in January is now relying on the WHO to run the contact tracing across three continents.
5. Gas Prices Are Up 50% Since the Iran War Started. The Same Republicans Who Hammered Biden Over Gas Are Suddenly Out of Town.
The average price of a gallon of gas in the United States hit $4.48 last week, a 50 percent increase from before President Trump’s war with Iran began and the highest pump price Americans have paid since 2022. 81 percent of Americans now say gas prices are straining their household budget, including 79 percent of Republicans.
This is the same party that built the entire 2022 and 2024 campaign cycles around gas prices. “I Did That” stickers of Joe Biden’s face went on pumps across the country. Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, asked on Newsmax about the price spike, told American families directly that their national security was more important than their wallets.
The “pay more, complain less” message is not just coming from one senator. Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, who is facing a tough reelection race in a district Trump barely won, ran a 2024 campaign ad saying gas prices had “gone through the roof” when the national average was $3.19. In March, with prices climbing and the Iran war underway, he told CNN they were “absolutely worth it.” Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, who in 2021 said Americans “can’t afford to pay 50% more to fill up their gas tanks” at $3.41, now calls the new $4.48 prices a simple “trade-off.”
Voters are noticing. Sixty-three percent of Americans, including a third of Republicans, blame Trump directly for the current gas price spike. Trump’s approval on the economy has dropped to 35 percent. Democrats now lead the generic congressional ballot by ten points. Republican strategists quoted by NOTUS say they have until the Fourth of July to fix this before it gets baked in for the midterms.
They are not going to fix it. The blockade is still in place. The war isn’t over. And the people in charge keep telling Americans the prices are worth it. And the American people keep disagreeing.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
Trump Heads to Beijing This Week for a High-Stakes Summit with Xi Jinping. President Trump arrives in Beijing on Thursday for a two-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the first state visit to China by a sitting U.S. President since Trump’s own 2017 trip. The White House says the agenda will focus on trade, rare earth exports, Taiwan, AI, and Iran, where Beijing remains Tehran’s largest oil buyer and could play a decisive role in reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The summit was originally scheduled for March but was delayed after the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran. Xi just hosted Iran’s foreign minister last week, signaling that Beijing wants to be seen as the broker who solves the war Trump started. China has also tightened rare earth export controls, banned Nexperia chip exports, and ordered Chinese companies not to comply with U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil.
RFK Jr. Just Launched a Federal Campaign to Get Americans Off Antidepressants. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced last Monday a new federal initiative to curb “overprescribing” of psychiatric medications, with a particular focus on getting Americans off SSRIs like Zoloft, Prozac, Lexapro, and Paxil. Kennedy framed the plan as one focused on “patient autonomy” and “informed consent,” and said the country has a “dependency crisis driven by overmedicalization.” The initiative includes new Medicare and Medicaid payments for clinicians who help patients taper off these medications and new federal training materials on so-called deprescribing. Kennedy has previously claimed that SSRIs are more addictive than heroin and may be linked to school shootings. The medical evidence does not support either claim. The American Psychiatric Association responded by stating it “strongly objects to framing the nation’s mental health crisis as primarily a problem of overmedicalization.”
