Events of Friday, September 4, showed the Trump administration in a 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. 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.”
In other words, the plan is both illegal and unconstitutional.
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. Talwani agreed that the rule threatens the voting rights of millions of American 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.” Contradicting Talwani, the Department of Justice lawyers claimed: “The Rule does not displace a single State election law. And it need not and should not prevent a single voter from voting by 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. She noted that in April the administration agreed to provide 14 days’ notice before any construction started, an agreement ordered by the 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.” 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).
Trump also denied that military personnel are seeing record long deployments, and insisted that the U.S. controls the Strait of 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.
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.
The journalists note that such a proceeding is unprecedented and comes as Hegseth works harder and harder to control information coming from the Pentagon. “Mass polygraph tests have never been administered to the top ranks of the U.S. military in modern history,” they write.
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. 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.
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. 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.”
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.”
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. “We could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with other countries,” he said. “We lose with Mexico $195 billion a year. They have nothing that we have to have, I mean, hot tamales, tomatoes, a couple of 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. It means more goods were imported from it than exported to it. Why has to do with many factors, mainly the United States has more highly paid, skilled, and educated service workers.”
On Friday, the White House debuted computer games on the official White House 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. 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. To our fans everywhere: we love you, we see you, and we’re grateful to have you in our community.
“P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’.
“P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously.”
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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
The African Group, made up of 54 African member states, introduced the resolution, which is not binding but will put the weight of the U.N. behind a different map projection that shows the continent sizes much more accurately. The United States was the only country to vote against the measure.
Also on Friday, Joe Sommerlad of the Independent confirmed reporting from the Washington Examiner the day before that, according to a White House official, First Lady Melania Trump will not attend Trump’s novel midterm convention next week in Dallas. She joins at least 45 Republican lawmakers who told Mia McCarthy, Meredith Lee Hill, and Jordain Carney of Politico they are steering clear of participating in an event with the deeply unpopular president for which tickets for Republican lawmakers start at $25,000.
One lawmaker called the event “a waste of time,” explaining: “You shouldn’t be having to rally your base at this point. You should be trying to convince independents. Independents are not attending nor watching the midterm convention.” Republican National Committee press secretary Natalie Baldassarre countered that “the outreach and enthusiasm to attend, participate, and speak at this historic midterm convention has been incredible.”
In an interview with Ben Terris of New York Magazine published Friday, Trump agreed that Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) was right to say that he was putting his name on things now because nobody else will when he’s gone. “That’s true,” Trump told Terris. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”
