Letters from an American - Administration is Feeling Pressure

Episode Date: April 4, 2026

April 2, 2026Trump invokes the right-wing vision of the Goldwater era, Trump's 2027 budget plan about to be released and will shape the Republican argument for the mid term elections, Administration is under pressure to fund domestic programs, Reporting shows that DHS has used special agents in immigration sweeps, resulting in use of force and deaths, Trump addresses nation, but does not make any significant announcement about the Iran war, Tension in Defense Department results in firings, Trump fires Attorney General Pam Bondi, angry about her handling of the Epstein files and that she has not adequately punished his enemies.Watch today's recording here: https://www.youtube.com/live/g9TUa1Rwd6U?si=T8_KKcHQZElhpnZ-Get full, free access to Letters from an American here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribeYou can also find me:Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/hcrichardson.bsky.socialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/heathercoxrichardson/?hl=enFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@heathercoxrichardson Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

April 2, 26. This afternoon, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media a video of the theme song of the Davy Crockett TV series from 1954 to 1955, starring Fess Parker. Over the clip, he wrote, Davy Crockett, obviously a distant relative of Jasmine Crockett and a very high IQ IQ frontiersman, would be proud of the legacy that he began long ago, and especially Jasmine's great success as a politician from the great state of Texas. President Donald J. Trump. The Walt Disney studio designed the Davy Crockett Western Series for children when Trump was about nine, an age that put him in the right demographic to have been part of the Davy Crockett craze that put the ballot of Davy Crockett at the top of the hit parade and spurred the sale of $300 million of Davy Crockett merchandise as little

little boys begged their parents for raccoon caps that would make them look like a Western hero. Jasmine Crockett is a current Democratic U.S. representative from Texas. There is no evidence she is related to David Crockett, who served as a U.S. representative from Tennessee from 1827 to 1835, and who died at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. Trump mused about their possible relationship before in 2025. It feels frighteningly appropriate for a 1950s television western to seem more important to Trump right now than the real world of April 2026 does. Davy Crockett was only one of the many westerns on television in the 1950s and 1960s, as those eager to dismantle the New Deal government championed the idea of the Western hero as the true American. Trump is trying to bring to life a right-wing political fantasy of the 1950s, and Americans in the present are making clear they reject it.

After World War II, Republican businessmen, southern racists, and religious traditionalists hated the government that both Democrats and Republicans had embraced since 1933, one that leveled the American social and economic playing field by regulating business, providing a basic social social social. safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights. They insisted that such a system of government action was socialism or even communism, and contrasted it with their fantasy of an independent white man on the frontier, who wanted nothing of the government but to be left alone. In 1960, a ghost-written book released under the name of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who wore a cowboy hat and boasted of his family's ties to the the Old West, although he himself grew up with a live-in-maid and a chauffeur, articulated this right-wing vision. The conscience of a conservative maintained that even if Americans liked the new government

that had stabilized the country since the Great Depression and World War II, the Constitution's framers had deliberately written a document that would prevent the tyranny of the masses. In place of a strong federal government, the book said, power should go back to the government. the states to restore true freedom to black Americans, farmers, and workers. Federal action had given those groups too much power, and they were using it to destroy liberty and lower the American standard of living. In their hands, the book said, the U.S. was on its way to becoming a totalitarian state. At the same time, the government must protect the country with an increasingly strong military. At an Easter lunch reception yesterday, Trump echoed this argument precisely. I said to Office of

Management and Budget Director Russell vote, don't send any money for daycare because the United States can't take care of daycare, he said. That has to be up to a state. We can't take care of daycare. We're a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We're fighting wars. We can't take care of daycare. You got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too. They should pay. They'll have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. And we could lower our taxes a little bit to them to make up, but it's not possible for us to take care of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can't do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing, military protection.

Trump is expected to release his 2027 budget plan tomorrow in time to use it to shape Republicans' argument for the midterm elections in November. Like Trump's budget requests for 2026, it calls for an enormous boost to the nation's military spending, $1.5 trillion, to be paid for with cuts to domestic programs. But members of Congress recognized that domestic spending is popular, and their 2026 appropriations bills kept domestic. spending relatively flat. The popular pressure to fund domestic programs showed today when House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana, backpedaled on the Senate's plan to fund

the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, without funding immigration and customs enforcement and the parent agency for Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection. Far-right House Republicans opposed the Senate's bill and, bowing to them, bowing to them, Johnson called the Senate's bill a joke and sent House members home until April 13th without voting on it. Today, Johnson said he would bring the bill forward to pass it with Democratic support

and that Republicans would then try to fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection through a budget reconciliation measure that does not need Democratic votes. Racism was central to the rhetoric of cowboy individualism, and the institutional of that racism in the mass deportations and incarcerations of the Department of Homeland Security under Trump has created a backlash. A poll last week by the Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, shows that only 35% of Americans approve of Trump's handling of immigration, while 61% disapprove. An analysis of DHS records by Ali Winston and Maddie Varnes, of Wired. Revealed today that DHS has used agents from special units accustomed to dealing with high-risk warrants, armed drug cartels, and man hunts for civil immigration sweeps.

Agents from Border Patrol Tactical Unit or Bortac and its sister unit, Border Patrol Search, Trauma and Rescue, or BOR STAR, the journalist's analysis shows that these agents are, as a group, the most violent of the hundreds of federal agents deployed to Chicago. Following the use of force guidelines rewritten by former leader Gregory Bovino, himself a member of Bortak, their use of force there included punching and kicking protesters, throwing tear gas, macing civilians, firing pepper balls and 40-millimeter foam rounds into crowds, shocking people with tasers, unleashing dogs on deportation targets, and shooting unarmed civilians, killing at least one of them.

Silvio Villegas Gonzalez shot at close range as he fled from officers after a traffic stop. The county medical examiner yesterday declared the death of Naurul Amin Shah Alam, a visually impaired Rohingya refugee

from Myanmar, whom Border Patrol agents dropped off in the parking lot of a coffee shop on a frigid February night in Buffalo, New York, a homicide. Rather than releasing him to his family or lawyer, CBP officers offered Shah Alam what they called a courtesy ride.

He was found dead five days after agents left him at the closed shop. A DHS spokesperson told Sidney Carruth of MS Now that the homicide ruling was, another hoax being peddled by the media and sanctuary politicians to demonize our law enforcement. This death had nothing to do with Border Patrol. Those who oppose government social welfare programs, regulation of business, and so on, have worked to concentrate power in the president, knowing that Congress will hesitate to slash programs their voters like. Yesterday, Assistant Attorney General T. Elliott Gaser of the Office of Legal Counsel

published an opinion for the White House that claims the Presidential Records Act, which requires that presidents keep records of their official business and turn them over at the end of their term, is unconstitutional. Gaser clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. The PRA is not a valid exercise of Congress's Article 1 authority and unconstitutionally intrudes on the independence and autonomy of the president guaranteed by Article 2. The Act establishes a permanent and burdensome regime of congressional regulation of the presidency, untethered from any valid and identifiable legislative purpose, the memo reads. For these reasons, the PRA is unconstitutional, and the president need not further comply with its dictates. The fallout from that concentration of power is showing now in Trump's disastrous adventure,

in Iran, undertaking to attack the country without consultation either with Congress or with allies. Yesterday evening, Trump commandeered time from television networks to deliver what officials build as a major announcement on the Iran war. But rather than announce anything new in his first address to the nation about a war that has gone on now for more than a month, Trump rambled for 19 minutes, reiterating what he has put in social media posts. He said the war was almost over, but also that military operations were going to intensify, said its purpose was to destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities, despite his claim in June 2025 to have obliterated those capabilities, and said the rise in oil and gas prices would be only a short-term increase.

Sounding tired and speaking in a monotone, Trump reiterated his claim. Trump reiterated his claim, that the U.S. doesn't need the oil that travels through the Strait of Hormuz, and demanded that other nations who need the oil more force Iran to reopen it. In reality, the U.S. is tied into international oil markets, and prices not only of oil, but also of products that use oil to get to market, are already rising. One Republican strategist from a battleground state texted Lisa Kaczynski and Alec Hernandez of Politico. What the hell did he just say?

The strategist called the speech nonsense. As Trump spoke, U.S. stock futures plummeted, erasing about $550 billion in 25 minutes. Today, 40 nations, led by Britain and France, discussed ways in which they could work to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The United States was not invited to participate. In the midst of this crisis, the tension between the Army's leadership and Defense Secretary Pete Hegesith blew up today when Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George. The Army Chief of Staff is the highest ranking officer in the U.S. Army, the top military advisor for the Secretary of the Army, overseeing planning, training, and policy.

George was appointed to his position in 2023 and worked closely with four. former Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, the four-star general who preceded Hegseth. Recently, George refused to remove four officers, two women and two black men, from a promotion list at Hegsett's insistence. A source who spoke to Jennifer Jacobs, Eleanor Watson, and James Leporta of CBS News, said that Hegseth wants someone in the role who will implement President Trump and Hegsitt's vision for the Army. Two other army leaders were also removed, General David Hodney, leader of the Army's Transformation and Training Command, and Major General William Green, head of the Army's

chaplain Corps. Hegzeth has reworked the Chaplain Corps recently to limit the range of religious instruction available to military personnel. And finally, Trump today fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, by posting her dismissal on social media. He was apparently angry that she has not adequately punished his enemies and that her botched handling of the Epstein files has stoked rather than calmed the story. For the present, her replacement will be Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche,

who was Trump's personal lawyer before joining the Department of Justice. It was Blanche who met privately with Jeffrey Epstein's associate, convicted sex trafficker Ghelaine Maxwell last July, as the outcry over the Department of Justice's apparent cover-up of the Epstein files grew. After their meeting, Maxwell was moved from the prison where she was being held in Florida to a less restrictive minimum security federal prison camp in Texas.

Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscor Productions, Dead in Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.