Letters from an American
· collected 2026-09-06 · by Heather Cox Richardson
commentary
Events of Friday, September 4, showed the Trump administration in a nutshell.
asserted
Events → show → nutshell
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani of the District of Massachusetts blocked Trump’s plan to use the United States Postal Service to screen mail-in voters.
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Talwani → block → voters
Referring to the final rule the USPS is trying to put into place, Talwani wrote: “Unauthorized by the Elections Clause, the Final Rule clashes with Congress’s statutory scheme, and is unconstitutional where it intrudes not only on Congress’s Elections Clause powers but also that power left to the States.”
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it → refer → States
As Jacob Knutson and Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket reported, Talwani was responding to a lawsuit over the plan brought by groups defending the right to vote, including the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts and Democratic attorneys general from 24 states and the District of Columbia.
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Talwani → report → Columbia
Talwani agreed that the rule threatens the voting rights of millions of American citizens.
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rule → agree → citizens
Hours after Judge Talwani’s order, the Trump administration asked U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols to permit the rule to go into effect, claiming it simply “imposes modest informational requirements on senders of outbound federal ballot mailings.”
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it → ask → mailings
Contradicting Talwani, the Department of Justice lawyers claimed: “The Rule does not displace a single State election law.
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Rule → contradict → law
And it need not and should not prevent a single voter from voting by mail.”
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it → prevent → mail
Meanwhile, a day after Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the administration was starting work on the 250-foot (76-meter) triumphal arch Trump wants in Washington, D.C., U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered the administration to give the court at least 48 hours’ notice before doing anything except dig pits to identify cultural artifacts at the site.
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Chutkan → announce → site
She noted that in April the administration agreed to provide 14 days’ notice before any construction started, an agreement ordered by the court.
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construction → note → court
Burgum’s announcement suggested the administration is pushing the project forward without going through any of the required permitting or obeying the law that requires Congress to pass a law allowing another memorial in the protected area of Washington, D.C., known as Area I.
Questioned about the war in Iran, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday that it is actually not a war but “a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us.”
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it → suggest → us
He compared the Iran war, which is in its sixth month without congressional authorization of any sort and has taken the lives of 18 U.S. service members, to the much longer Vietnam War which he claimed took more than 100,000 service members’ lives (the Department of Defense says the actual number was 58,220).
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number → compare → Defense
Trump also denied that military personnel are seeing record long deployments, and insisted that the U.S. controls the Strait of Hormuz.
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U.S. → deny → Hormuz
He turned back to the argument that the war was to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, although those discussions now appear to be off the table as the U.S. tries to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
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U.S. → turn → Hormuz
Jonathan Swan, Adam Entous, Maggie Haberman, and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported on Friday that although Trump and members of the administration insist that reports of a shortage of crucial munitions are a lie, government investigators forced about 50 members of the U.S. military’s Joint Staff—about 2,000 officials who coordinate operations and policy with commanders around the world—to take lie detector tests to determine if they had been the source of the leaks to journalists.
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they → report → journalists
The journalists note that such a proceeding is unprecedented and comes as Hegseth works harder and harder to control information coming from the Pentagon.
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Hegseth → note → Pentagon
“Mass polygraph tests have never been administered to the top ranks of the U.S. military in modern history,” they write.
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they → administer → history
Also on Friday, Catie Edmondson and Carolyn Y. Johnson reported in the New York Times that the Defense Department and the National Institutes of Health have signed an agreement providing a framework to collaborate on biodefense and pandemic preparedness.
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Department → report → preparedness
According to officials who spoke with the reporters, the deal could mean moving as much as $2 billion from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—roughly one-third the budget of the agency Dr. Anthony Fauci used to run—to the Pentagon.
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Fauci → accord → Pentagon
Amidst reports that the Navy has run out of money, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been trying unsuccessfully to push through Congress a short-term injection of $350 billion on top of the additional $150 billion congressional Republicans gave the Pentagon last year.
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Republicans → run → billion
Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, accused the Defense Department of “trying to rob N.I.H. of billions of dollars that Congress provided for medical research so that it can pad the Pentagon’s budget.”
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it → accuse → budget
NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya appeared to confirm the agreement when he posted on social media that “far from siphoning money away from research, this partnership between [NIH] and [the Defense Department] focuses on research projects that will drive discoveries to improve the health of American citizens and members of the military.”
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that → appear → military
In the White House on Friday, Trump appeared to misunderstand not only that since World War II trade has made the United States wealthy, but also the concept of trade itself.
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States → appear → trade
“We could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with other countries,” he said.
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We → do → countries
“We lose with Mexico $195 billion a year.
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We → lose → billion
They have nothing that we have to have, I mean, hot tamales, tomatoes, a couple of things.”
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I → have → things
Aside from the fact the U.S. imports machinery, agricultural products, vehicles, auto parts, electronics, and so on from Mexico, readers on social media noted: “The trade deficit is not a debt, it does not represent losing money to the other country.
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it → import → country
It means more goods were imported from it than exported to it.
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goods → mean → it
Why has to do with many factors, mainly the United States has more highly paid, skilled, and educated service workers.
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States → have → workers
On Friday, the White House debuted computer games on the official White House website.
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House → debut → website
The “games” are ripoffs of older games like Snake, this one with a white man in a suit picking up Black, Asian, and Latino men and putting them in orange jumpsuits.
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man → pick → jumpsuits
There was also apparently one ripping off Tetris, which was apparently about building Trump’s wall, but it disappeared as the real Tetris posted: “At Tetris we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them.
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we → be → them
To our fans everywhere: we love you, we see you, and we’re grateful to have you in our community.
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we → love → community
“P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’.
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Company → involve → Wall
“P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously.”
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We → take → infringement
On Friday, September 4, the administration also reiterated its determination to roll back environmental protections, proposing a new rule that would end protections against pollution and industrial impacts for a significant number of streams and wetlands.
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that → reiterate → streams
As Zahra Hirji of Bloomberg reported, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed redefining which bodies of water would qualify for federal protection.
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bodies → report → protection
Also on Friday, the United Nations General Assembly voted 164–1, with six countries abstaining, for a resolution changing the world map to more accurately reflect the sizes of the continents.
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countries → vote → continents
As Jewel Bright of NPR reports, the commonly-used Mercator projection, created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, was designed to enable navigators to plot courses on the straight lines of compass bearings.
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projection → report → bearings
It distorts the size of landmasses, making the ones closest to the poles disproportionately large, while areas close to the Equator—like Africa—are shown as significantly smaller than they really are.
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they → distort → Africa
…and 12 more, not listed.
