Okay, I believe we are live. I'm just realizing I never checked my mic settings or anything. Hopefully you all can hear me and hopefully I'll be able to hear you, Bill.

Hey everybody. I'm Andrew Agar, White House correspondent with the bulwark. This is Bill Crystal editor at large of the bulwark. We write the morning shots newsletter. We come to you every morning, every Tuesday morning to talk about what we've written about, talk about other stuff going on in the world this week.

It's a busy one. We are talking a little bit today about the ongoing fallout from Saturday

night's attack on the White House Correspondence Dinner, where a shooter tried fortunately unsuccessfully

to break into the White House Correspondence dinner with an apparent hit list of Trump administration officials. But today we are going, we've talked a lot

about that on these different shows and in our newsletters already. But we're going to talk a little

bit more about the White House's response to this today, because we saw that starting to take

shape yesterday in the form of a couple of, I guess,

initiatives, you'd say. The White House has channeled this in a couple of different directions,

not necessarily exactly the directions you would have expected going into this,

not necessarily the direction they have channeled these sorts of things in the past when it comes

to outbreaks of

violence or attempted violence against prominent Republicans, prominent conservatives.

So let's just start with what Donald Trump and somewhat surprisingly Melania Trump spent

yesterday kind of really focusing on with this, which was this sort of strange bankshot attack on Jimmy Kimmel. I don't know if you saw this one coming, Bill. I was sort of surprised that this was like the main thing for the president yesterday, but let's just read this. Wow. He says on truth social. Jimmy Kimmel, who is in no way funny, as attested to by his terrible television ratings, made a statement on his show that is really shocking. He showed a fake video of the first lady, Melania, and our son Barron, like they were actually sitting in his studio, listening to him speak, which they weren't and never would be. He then stated, our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow. A day later, a lunatic tried entering the ballroom of the White House

correspondence dinner, loaded up with a shotgun, handgun, and many knives. He was there for a very obvious and sinister reason. I appreciate that so many people are incensed by Kimmel's despicable call to violence, and normally would not be responsive to anything he said, but this is something far beyond the pale. Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. And that came, I believe, a little bit after a post from Melania that hit a lot of the same, oh, here it is perfect, a lot of the same beats. Kimmel's hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. His monologue about my family isn't comedy. His words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America. People like Kimmel shouldn't have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate. A coward. Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him. Enough is enough. It's time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC's leadership enable Kimmel's atrocious behavior at the expense of our community?

Now, this is all somewhat, I mean, it's all really strange in a lot of ways. It's strange that this

is the kind of lead response to this attempted attack from the president, from the First Lady.

But it's also strange because it's, I mean, it really, it truly is a misrepresentation of the joke

that Kimmel made. I don't know if we have that, have that clip. But let's, if we do, we can play it.

If we don't, I can just talk through kind of what, what Kimmel was saying there. I think, actually, I think the clip that we have is what he said in the, in the response to it. So I'll just, I'll just really quick repeat the joke. Basically, Kimmel was saying he kind of did like a roast. It was two nights before the White House Correspondents dinner.

And it was him basically saying, you know, you look great, Melania, you look like you have the glow of an expectant widow, basically just making kind of an age gap joke about the president and the first lady, right? He's his third wife, much younger wife, former model, you know, it's sort of schick, right? It's like a normal threadbare late night,

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