The Fact Check Presidency

A Claim About September

The first week of September in Washington is always a reckoning with memory. On the 25th anniversary of the attacks, a story began moving fast online: the Flight 93 National Memorial had moved its 2026 observance to accommodate a visit from Donald Trump or JD Vance, and neither showed up while Trump went to golf instead. The claim spread on X and Facebook, with screenshots and outraged commentary.

The memorial’s 2026 program started earlier than in prior years, at 8:30 a.m. instead of the usual 9:45 or 9:50. The program was also longer, adding musical selections and remembrances for the three other hijacked flights — American Airlines Flight 11 at 8:46 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 at 9:03 a.m. and American Airlines Flight 77 at 9:37 a.m. If those flights were to be honored at the times they crashed, an earlier start made sense.

A White House spokesperson said by email on September 16 that neither Trump nor Vance was scheduled to attend the Flight 93 observance on September 11, 2026. Trump attended a commemoration ceremony at the Pentagon with military leaders that day while Vance attended a commemoration event in New York City at the site of the former Twin Towers. Trump traveled to Dublin, Ireland, in the evening for a two-day visit that included attending the Irish Open at his Doonbeg golf club on September 13. No evidence emerged that the time change was made for a presidential visit, and the claim remained unproven.

The episode distilled the year’s mood: a rumor built on a real change in scheduling, amplified by partisan anger, and then dissected in public until the gap between what was said and what happened became the story.

Dallas and the Language of Certainty

The Republican midterm convention was held September 9 and 10 in Dallas, the first for the party during the midterms. President Donald Trump gave the keynote on the first night, Vice President JD Vance spoke on the second, joined by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Speakers repeatedly credited the Trump administration for a large drop in the violent crime rate in 2025 and a historically low murder rate, framing it as a consequence of Trump taking office and a turnaround from the Biden years. The violent crime rate had been falling for several years after a pandemic spike, and criminologists said there were many possible reasons for the 2025 drop and the exact reasons were unclear.

Kennedy said Democrats “closed every church in our country for a year” during the pandemic. Restrictions on religious gatherings were implemented by both parties and typically capped attendance rather than prohibiting services altogether, and many restrictions ended or were made less strict within months.

Trump vowed to end no cash bail, saying under the policy “somebody kills somebody and they’re out in the streets two hours later.” In states with cashless bail policies that almost never happens.

Johnson said Republicans inherited “record high” inflation from the Biden administration. The annualized inflation rate had declined to 3 percent when Trump entered office, a lower rate than it is now.

Trump said he built almost 2,000 miles of border wall. The actual number is about a third of that, and only if replacement wall is included rather than new wall where there was none before.

On the first night, Trump promised every adult citizen a $5,000 dividend if Republicans won the House and Senate, suggesting tariff policies would pay for it. Revenue from tariffs had increased under Trump, but the U.S. brought in $264 billion in net tariff revenue in 2025, up from $79 billion in 2024, and the proposal would cost around $1.2 trillion for 245 million adults. The president also continued to push the falsehood that he won the presidency three times.

The convention was a showcase for a familiar rhetorical habit: a claim stated with absolute confidence, followed by a fact-check that quietly undercut it.

Mail, the Postal Service, and the Courts

Mail voting became the central battlefield for election integrity in the final months before the November 3 elections. Early voting began on September 18. Virginia began early in-person voting, while voters in Minnesota, Idaho and South Dakota could cast absentee ballots in person. The start came at a time of deep angst about the cost of living, with mortgage rates nearing 7 percent, consumer prices rising 3.4 percent in the year to August, and gas prices close to their highest levels since 2022.

In March Trump signed an executive order forbidding the U.S. Postal Service from delivering mailed ballots to anyone deemed ineligible, with the Department of Homeland Security working with the Social Security Administration to devise a list. Critics called the move plainly illegal because the federal government cannot set election rules; only states can. A whistleblower told Congress the Postal Service did not have the ability to implement the system safely and the plan was perilosly rushed and potentially unlawful.

Alabama, North Carolina and Wisconsin had already begun mailing out ballots before the Supreme Court ruled. The Court restored a measure of order by rebuking the president and rejecting his plan. Trump responded on Truth Social, calling mailed ballots “corrupt and out of control,” singling out justices who had gone against him.

The top official at the U.S. Postal Service, Postmaster General David Steiner, said on September 17 that the agency had stopped work on developing a controversial computer system central to the effort to limit mail voting after the Supreme Court rejected the executive order. “There’s an injunction so we’re not doing anything,” he told the Associated Press. A memo sent to employees said the agency would not be enforcing any new rules in the 2026 federal election and that for election mail it is business as usual.

Steiner said the postal service would still encourage the use of envelopes and barcodes in future elections, charging a lower price for compliance and a higher price for noncompliance, and encouraged voters to cast ballots early. The extraordinary danger, analysts argued, was that a president who believes he is the law remains intent on disrupting the electoral process. The Brookings Institution has found an average total mail voting fraud percentage across the 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 general elections of only 0.000043 percent, or about four cases of mail voting fraud out of every ten million mail votes. Trump has voted by mail at least three times since 2020.

The Ads and the Rural Health Fight

As the midterms approached, ads supporting Democrats and Republicans made competing claims about President Donald Trump’s signature domestic policy law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Groups backing Republican candidates ran ads highlighting a $50 billion rural healthcare fund in the law while ignoring its much larger cuts to Medicaid, which are expected to reduce funding for rural healthcare overall.

In Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, an ad said a Republican representative secured millions for rural hospitals. In Colorado’s 8th, an ad thanked a Republican representative for voting to pass the biggest investment ever in rural healthcare. In Alaska, an ad celebrated the fund as the biggest investment in rural healthcare in American history. In Ohio, an ad said a Republican senator supported a $200 million investment in rural hospitals.

The law is expected to cut federal Medicaid spending by around $900 billion over a decade and increase the number of people without insurance by 10 million, including 7.5 million from Medicaid, according to projections from the Congressional Budget Office. The $50 billion for rural health, known as the Rural Health Transformation Program, was a late addition meant to shore up support from wavering lawmakers who worried reductions in Medicaid funding would be especially hard on providers in rural areas.

The health policy research organization KFF estimated the law would reduce federal Medicaid funding for rural areas by $137 billion over ten years. The hit to rural hospitals alone could come to $57 billion, according to an analysis commissioned by the National Rural Health Association. Experts said cuts could squeeze hospitals as people lose coverage and more uninsured patients seek care, and limits on certain financing mechanisms used by states to fund Medicaid could result in hospitals getting paid less for treating Medicaid patients.

Two Trump-aligned super PACs reserved more than $150 million in ads for key races, primarily in deep red House and Senate races that have now become competitive. The cavalry arrived with a checkbook while the policy debate turned on whether money for rural hospitals could offset larger Medicaid reductions.

Science, Skepticism, and the White House

The administration’s approach to science and public health was on display in September. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave the keynote address on September 17 at a conference of the anti-vaccine activist group he once chaired, telling attendees they had a strong and steadfast friend in the White House. He said the administration had accomplished in 19 months things that would have seemed unthinkable two years ago.

Kennedy boasted about moves to downsize the childhood vaccination schedule and reshape a key vaccine advisory board, steps that have since been halted by a judge. He lauded Trump for pushing ahead with attempts to overhaul vaccine guidance, including an executive order last month calling for spacing out the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine against medical groups’ recommendations.

The speech came as the country faced its worst year for measles since 1991 and had seen seven reported measles-associated deaths in the last two years. Pennsylvania officials reported four measles-associated deaths this year; none of the four were vaccinated. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro blasted Kennedy’s appearance, saying the secretary should have encouraged people to get vaccinated for measles instead of stoking fear and mistrust.

In Pittsburgh, researchers were mourning the cancellation of a 15-year study of aging, low-income, majority Black neighborhoods. The Phresh study had collected cognitive tests, biometric data and life-course surveys meant to allow early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers were given 90 days to shut down the study, more than five months earlier than expected. The Trump administration has cancelled, frozen or otherwise disrupted more than 5,700 medical research grants at the National Institutes of Health. Participants who had been promised feedback on their cognitive assessments may never learn the results.

A federal judge ordered the Kennedy Center to give 30 days’ notice before making any major physical changes to the building, including demolition, amid a dispute over plans to put the president’s name on the building and a proposed $257 million renovation. The center is currently closed due to what its Trump-backed leadership described as safety issues.

The End of the Summer

By mid-September the campaign had shifted focus to cost of living and the Iran war. The Trump administration approved a potential sale of 48 advanced F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, worth an estimated $24.3 billion. The conflict with Iran had entered its seventh month, with Iran still able to disrupt regional shipping and the war putting further pressure on global energy prices.

Early voting had begun, the Postal Service had walked back a mail voting system, and the convention’s claims were being catalogued and corrected in real time. The year’s narrative is not just about policy but about the friction between assertion and verification. In 2026, Donald Trump remains president of the United States, a Republican with a public profile built on bold claims, and the media ecosystem around him is built on checking them, often after the fact.

The reader is left with a question that keeps returning: how much can a political movement sustain when its stories are constantly being tested, and how does a public learn to live with that testing as a permanent condition.