Don’t mess with the U.S. mail
On Thursday, President Trump finally said it out loud: He objects to emergency bailout funding for the U.S. Postal Service because it would facilitate an expansion of mailin voting by states worried about the public health.
That a president would openly talk about resisting funding to secure American voting in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century is as stunning as it is shameful. It’s nothing less than an attack on democracy.
While he has been veering between blocking such funding or merely holding it hostage for his other demands on Congress, Trump made his clearest and most ominous statements during a Thursday morning interview with Fox Business.
“They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said of Democratic demands. “If they don’t get those items, that means you can’t have universal mailin voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”
He later suggested he could reach a deal as part of a larger negotiation — as if having a wellexecuted election were a legitimate bargaining chip for a president. Or, perhaps more cynically, Trump may be angling to turn his unfounded warning that mailin voting would bring chaos and fraud — delaying and potentially muddying the outcome — into a selffulfilling prophecy.
“All they have to do is make a deal,” he said at his Thursday afternoon news conference.“If they make a deal, the Postal Service is taken care of, the money they need for the mailin ballots would be taken care of — if we agree to it. That doesn’t mean we are going to agree to it, but all they have to do is make a deal.”
The operative word is if.
If Trump were genuinely concerned about the sanctity of mail voting, then he would be pushing for funding to give the Postal Service and the states the resources they need to distribute, collect and process the ballots in a timely manner. Yet it’s important to juxtapose this handcuffing of the Postal Service with myriad other Republican attempts to suppress the vote. Among the tactics: ID laws, overly aggressive purging of the rolls, partisan gerrymandering of districts, closures of polls and a halt to early voting.
Former President Barack Obama weighed in with a tweet that noted the daytoday cost of undermining postal mail.
“Everyone depends on the USPS. Seniors for their Social Security, veterans for their prescriptions, small businesses trying to keep their doors open,” Obama wrote Friday. “They can’t be collateral damage for an administration more concerned with suppressing the vote than suppressing a virus.”
Americans who depend on postal mail deserve to have a champion in the postmaster general. Instead, that position is filled by Louis DeJoy, a Trump campaign megadonor who reportedly has tens of millions invested in the Postal Service’s competitors. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, DMass., has called for an investigation into DeJoy’s holdings.
The suspicions that DeJoy is doing Trump’s political bidding have been elevated by a series of policy changes that have slowed mail delivery in some areas. DeJoy insisted in a letter to postal employees that such problems were “unintended consequences” of a transition that will make the service more effective and fiscally stable. His explanation might be more plausible to accept if not for Trump’s blatant attempts to challenge the legitimacy of the election before a single vote is cast.
American democracy is being tested as rarely before in its history.