LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
June 22, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson
Jun 23, 2026
It appears to be more and more clear that the Trump administration is mired in its own mistakes.
There is no way to spin the memorandum of understanding Trump signed last Friday at Versailles to advance peace talks with Iran as a win. Trump deliberately shut off both Congress and allies from the decision to go to war, making the conflict his own. That means the MOU, which achieves none of the goals Trump claimed while at the same time giving Iran access to hundreds of billions of dollars, belongs to Trump, too.
A wide range of U.S. commentators are calling the MOU a “disaster” and saying the United States lost the war. As Isaac Arnsdorf and Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reported, right-wing hardliner on Iran Mark Dubowitz said: “The actual MOU is deeply flawed. The administration needs to stop defending it beyond stating the truth: It’s a stopgap measure to resupply energy markets, lower gas prices, and help Republicans in the midterms.”
Today, after a quick trip to Switzerland for talks with Iranian negotiators, Vice President J.D. Vance told reporters that Iran had agreed to allow international observers periodically to inspect its nuclear program. Vance called it a “major milestone for the American people, and the first step in permanently denuclearizing or permanently ending a nuclear weapons program in Iran,” and Trump heralded the plan.
In fact, such inspections were part of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated in 2015 under the Obama administration, the agreement that Trump tore up in 2018, and they continued at some sites until Trump ordered military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, a year ago today. After that, Iran refused inspections of the bombed sites. Inspections are good, but they basically just get us back to where we were before Trump took over.
The administration today also waived sanctions on Iranian oil for the period covered by the MOU as that document laid out, increasing the value of Iranian oil exports.
Meanwhile, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the problems with the Reflecting Pool are the product of vandalism by “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE,” and administration officials have stationed National Guard personnel around the Reflecting Pool. They appear to be handing out citations to individuals who touch the water.
A friendly media figure at the White House today noted that in April Trump said he was going to fix the Reflecting Pool “in a week for about a million dollars,” and wanted to know what was going on two months and sixteen and a half million dollars later. Trump answered: “Ok, ready? Barack Hussein Obama, have you ever heard of him?” Trump went on to lambaste what he said were Obama’s botched repairs to the pool.
Officials are now trying to silence both those calling attention to their failures and political opponents.
Trump has reacted with fury at media stories that expose his failures in Iran. In response to a New York Times story saying analysts did not see that the war had accomplished much, Trump called the paper’s reporters “corrupt and unethical cowards” and appeared to object to the First Amendment, writing: “The way the Corrupt and Failing New York Times is covering stories on a very battered and beat up Iran, through FAKE & MADE UP ‘FACTS’ is, in my opinion, ‘TREASONOUS.’ I will be adding all of their false and ridiculous reporting to my multi Billion Dollar lawsuit against them. They are Criminals!”
Trump is doing more than threatening media figures. He is increasing his effort to use the government against political opponents. In the face of bipartisan opposition, Trump has shoved loyalist William Pulte into position as acting director of national intelligence, overseeing the intelligence gathered by the nation’s eighteen intelligence agencies. Pulte officially took office on Friday.
Pulte has no experience in intelligence, although such experience is a requirement for the position. What he does have is demonstrated willingness to use the power of the federal government to attack Trump’s political opponents: it’s Pulte who came up with the idea of harassing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, New York attorney general Letitia James, and U.S. senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) by accusing them of criminal mortgage fraud. He also pushed the ouster of then–Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell by claiming Powell had lied to Congress about renovations to Federal Reserve office buildings.
Last year, Gina Heeb, Josh Dawsey, and Rebecca Ballhous of the Wall Street Journal reported that Pulte’s nickname in the administration is “Little Trump,” and when big Trump announced he would install Pulte as DNI, members of both parties balked. So Trump said he would instead nominate U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton, who helped slow walk the release of the Epstein Files, for the position. Despite Clayton’s lack of intelligence experience, the Senate Intelligence Committee scheduled confirmation hearings for June 17 to rush him into office before Pulte could step in.
Then, as The Guardian recounted, on June 17, just hours before the confirmation hearing was about to start, Trump posted that “we are cancelling the Senate Hearing RE: DNI today.” This meant Pulte would indeed become the acting DNI. He showed up at the office the next day—a day early—and ordered staff to list about 300 people to be fired from the National Counterterrorism Center.
This follows cuts under former DNI Tulsi Gabbard, who said in August 2025 she would cut 40% of the staff of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
Gabbard herself is under increased scrutiny today after an in-depth story yesterday by Jon Swaine of the Washington Post explored her ties to a religious leader of what observers describe as a cult. Swaine tracked the many parallels between what appear to be orders directed at her in conversations sent by email and her official acts when she was in Congress. In one 2015 memo, Swaine writes, the advisor told “TG” “that ‘your position in general’ should be to offer an alternative to other candidates in the ‘dishonest Democratic party.’”
On Friday, Erin Banco, Phil Stewart, and Jonathan Landay of Reuters reported that the ODNI is sitting on a report that identifies vulnerabilities in the nation’s voting machines. The machines’ software is outdated, leaving vulnerabilities that could be exploited. Gabbard began the report in order to investigate Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was rigged, but the investigation turned up no evidence of such action. Neither did a second report by a government contractor, Mojave Research, which investigated voting machines in Puerto Rico. That report, too, recommended immediate updates to software systems, but it appears those plans have not been implemented.
The administration appears to be trying to intimidate voting rights groups. On June 11, 100 FBI agents and other federal officers raided the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a group encouraging voter participation, especially by voters from groups that have historically been disenfranchised. Then the agents went to the homes of board members, staff, and volunteers, where they seized computers and phones, took documents, and questioned the people they found.
The search warrant said they were looking for voter fraud. As the Brennan Center—along with many others—has established, a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud. It is vanishingly rare.
Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center, which protects voting rights, notes that Project 2025, the right-wing plan for taking over the country after Trump took office, called for using the Justice Department to go after state election officials and voter registration groups to push the myth of voter fraud and make people afraid to vote.
Waldman explained that the leading voter registration group in Ohio is the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. In 2024, he says, it registered 100,000 voters, and it works to stop partisan gerrymandering in the state.
Republicans are working to undermine their opponents with subterfuge, too. Judd Legum of Popular Information reported today that a network of super PACs that claim to be progressive and are spending millions in Democratic primaries are actually funded by a Republican dark money group, the American Prosperity Alliance. New documents from the Federal Election Commission identify all of the funding for Lead Left PAC, Real Change PAC, and California Blue PAC as coming from Conservative Americans PAC, which is funded by the right-wing American Prosperity Alliance.
But the American people are pushing back on the administration, and it seems wobbly.
Outrage over the Iran deal has risen to such a fever pitch on the right that, as Josephine Walker of Axios reported, on Thursday, right-wing commenter Tucker Carlson announced on a podcast that he was leaving the Republican Party, adding: “And if I’m out, then I think a lot of other people are out.” Carlson said he will not support the Democrats either, suggesting he is testing out whether MAGA voters, especially the antisemitic ones who embrace his attacks on Israel, will follow him if he splits from Trump.
Most people don’t seem to be buying Trump’s excuses about the Reflecting Pool, either. Social media is flooded with jokes about “Sealant Team 6” and images of the reflecting pool as the Dead Marshes from the Lord of the Rings films or with the Creature from the Black Lagoon emerging from it. Upon hearing of the arrest of former Olympian David Hearn for destruction of government property after he touched the detached liner of the pool “but didn’t destroy or break or peel anything,” conservative commentator David Frum wrote: “If destruction of government property is a crime, I wonder what they’ll do to the man who tore down the East Wing without a permit.”
Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) posted: “There is a 24/7 camera that shows the reflecting pool. If someone went into the pool and made a 250 foot gash, it would have been seen. trump is lying again. Everyone knows it, but the people at [the Justice Department] are randomly going after people to soothe trump’s fragile ego.”
And today the courts struck back at Trump’s attempts to rig the 2026 vote. The Trump administration has tried to force states to turn over their voting rolls in order to run them through a query system that checks federal databases to make sure no immigrants are collecting benefits for which they’re not eligible. Confusingly, that system—the one used to make sure noncitizens don’t collect benefits for which they’re not eligible—is called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), making it hard to distinguish from the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (also SAVE) that Trump keeps pushing.
An investigation by Jen Fifield of ProPublica and Zach Despart of ProPublica and the Texas Tribune in February showed that when used to try to identify noncitizen voters, the system had an error rate of at least 14%, misidentifying legal voters as illegal ones.
Today U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., ruled that the administration could not use the SAVE system to check state voting rolls, saying: “The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
Tonight Trump posted a picture of a person dressed in a pink inflatable frog costume with the word “AMPHIFA” written across the belly, carrying a sign that reads: “FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE ALGAE.” Trump called the activist “a crazy pro-algae (likely paid) protestor.”
“Who’s paying team algae?” social media poster The Volatile Mermaid retorted. “George Sporos?”
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
