For the public, the most notable expression has been that the president’s Twitter feed has been, while not silent, subdued. Wednesday morning he took issue with former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’s Tuesday column calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment, but Trump’s defense of the amendment is unsurprising. He issued some relatively anodyne comments about negotiations with North Korea and China. So it’s been for several days. Even when the president goes to play the hits, he seems to be going through the motions rather than offering anything truly surprising:

So much Fake News. Never been more voluminous or more inaccurate. But through it all, our country is doing great! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 26, 2018

On Sunday and Monday, Trump tweeted that he wanted to “Build WALL through M!,” which some readers took to mean “Mexico,” which the president has long said he wanted to pay for a wall on the border. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that in fact the “M” stands for “military,” and the president wants funding to come through the Pentagon budget. (Such a move would likely provoke legal challenges, since Congress allocates money to the Defense Department for specific tasks, not as a lump sum to be distributed.) Yet Trump has not made any other public statement, and his choice to twice tweet the cryptic “M” rather than spell it out remains unexplained.

It is not only on Twitter that Trump is quiet. Trump’s schedule has been unusually light since the hastily convened session Friday where he railed against the spending bill. He hosted a credential ceremony for ambassadors, attended a private fundraiser in suburban Virginia, and has met with the vice president, treasury secretary, and defense secretary. Beyond that, there’s not much listed. As Christina Wilkie has pointed out, the schedule doesn’t list everything a president does, but the comparison with Trump’s usual routine is instructive. Furthermore, although the president often makes remarks to pool reporters during the day, there have been no events open to press, and weekend pool reporters at Mar-a-Lago barely set eyes on Trump.

This offers a nice case study in just how much the president himself drives the news cycle, because it is not as if there are not things that could be bigger news stories. There is Kim Jong Un’s visit to Beijing, which appears to be part of significant movement on the North Korean nuclear crisis. There is the apparently imminent firing of Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin. There is a new bilateral trade deal with South Korea, which Trump did tweet about. Most of all, there is the ongoing story of Stormy Daniels, the porn actress and stripper who has alleged an affair with Trump in 2006, and gave a major interview to 60 Minutes that aired over the weekend. Yet Trump has sat these out, for the most part.