Is Trump ambushing mail so he’s not sent packing?
Every time the Pew Research Center polls Americans on their attitudes toward government agencies, the U.S. Postal Service comes out on top.
This year, 91 percent of people polled declared a positive feeling about the USPS. It’s hard to imagine 91 percent of Americans having positive feelings about anything. A solitary barn swallow darting and diving across the smooth sunlit surface of a lake? Maybe 70 percent at best.
I had a dog named Roy who was in that other 9 percent. His goal in life was to bite the mailman. The mail came through a slot in the door, and Roy would wait there every afternoon. When the mail made its appearance, pushed halfway through the slot by unseen outside hands, Roy would seize it in his teeth and shake it like grouse, releasing it up toward the ceiling with one final furious shake.
Bills would inevitably fall behind the radiator and be found — still with tooth marks — years later, which may explain why my credit rating and my cholesterol count closely resemble one another.
When he was 15, death was near. He was chronically drowsy and unsteady on his feet. For that reason, another member of my household thought it was fine to let him nap under a backyard bush on a sunny Saturday.
But then Roy’s waking eye did spy the mailman crossing the driveway, perhaps 20 yards away. He heaved himself to his feet and loped — half a league, half a league onward — and managed to bite the hand that had fed so many letters through the slot.
Even the Animal Control Officer had to admit it was pretty epic.
Roy’s view is shared by the president of the United States but not by me. We really like our mail carrier — hi, Sherry! — and I continue to regard a postage stamp as an amazing bargain. Fifty-five cents! They will bring your letter anywhere, plus you get a nifty little Ellsworth Kelly painting or Wonder Woman or a Muppet or Lucille Ball.
Back to Roy and the president. Only one of them has bitten a postal employee, but both of them are (or were) openly hostile to the service provided.
On June 15, a man inappropriately named Louis DeJoy became Postmaster General and immediately began implementing “reforms” — elimination of overtime and changes in processing, sorting and routes — all of which have the net effect of slowing down the mail.
Internal documents contain new instructions to leave letters behind at distribution centers rather than start the route later.
A former North Carolina postmaster told the Guardian that violates a core principle. “The rule has always been you clear every piece of first class mail out of a plant every day, period. There has never been, never, in the 30 years I worked for the post office, there has never been a time when you curtail first class mail.”
It’s as if the slogan changed, overnight, to “Even if there’s no rain or snow or gloom of night, you might not get your letter because whatever.”
Last week, there were reports of sorting machines being removed from USPS facilities without explanation.
Actually, maybe someone did have an explanation.
Speaking to Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo Thursday morning, Trump explained his thinking about Democrats in Congress: “Now they need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”
You can’t make it much plainer than that.
This is a peculiarly obliging trait of Trump’s. Just when you think it will be nearly impossible to prove the base motive behind what he’s doing, he just blurts it out. Remember when he told Lester Holt he fired James Comey partly because of “this Russia thing?”
This should scare you. I may have said these words before in the past 3.5 years, and I say them again now. The president is trying to cripple a basic function of government, and he’s not even trying to hide the reason.
This is the part of the column where I tell you what you can do about it.
Actually, I’m not sure. Trump has a way of dragging us into uncharted waters where the rocks and dragons grow more plentiful and the life preservers more scarce.
We used to make fun of countries that had terrible postal service. Now he is intent on making us one of them.
And it’s not just bills and checks and ballots, friends. Millions of little tiny peeping poultry chicks are sent through the mail. From a 2017 Country Living article: “... shipping those chicks across the country is a feat of timing, cleverly engineered cardboard, and a network of humans working together to get the tiny birds to their destinations safely.”
The only reason I mention this is the other stuff doesn’t seem to move the needle anymore.