In a Nutshell

September 5, 2026 Events of Friday, September 4, show 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 United States Postal Service 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 Knudsen and Jim Soxa 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 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, or 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 1. 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 re-organize the U.S. and U.S. military operations. controls the U.S. as the U.S. tries to re-open the Strait of Hormuz. Jonathan Swan, Adam Entous, Maggie Haberman, and Eric Schmidt 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, Katie 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 of 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 the National Institutes of Health 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 the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Department is unthinkable." Dr. Bhattacharya, of the Department of the Department of Health 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 rip-offs 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 States General Assembly voted 164 to 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 land masses, 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 UN behind a different map projection that shows the continent's sizes much more accurately. The United States was the only country to vote against the measure. Also on Friday, Joe Summerlad 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 Jordaine 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 Baldessari countered that the outreach and enthusiasm to attend, participate, and speak at this historic midterm convention has been incredible. In an interview with Ben Terrace of New York Magazine, published Friday, Trump agreed that Senator John Ossoff, a Democrat of Georgia, 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 Terrace. Nobody will do it once I'm gone. When I leave here, nobody will. by Michael Moss.