Eventually, Trump always gives away his own con because he's impatient and undisciplined, and his efforts to destroy the US Postal Service in order to disenfranchise tens of millions of Democratic mail ballots is no exception.
President Trump said Thursday that he does not want to fund the U.S. Postal Service because Democrats are seeking to expand mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic, making explicit the reason he has declined to approve $25 billion in emergency funding for the cash-strapped agency.
“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,” Trump said in an interview on Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo. He added: “Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it.
Trump has railed against mail-in balloting for months, and at a White House briefing Wednesday, he argued without evidence that USPS’s enlarged role in the November election would perpetuate “one of the greatest frauds in history.”
During the Wednesday briefing, Trump told reporters he would not approve the $25 billion in emergency funding for the Postal Service, or $3.5 billion in supplemental funding for election resources, citing prohibitively high costs. But he went further in remarks Thursday morning, blaming Democrats’ efforts to make it easier for Americans to vote amid the pandemic.
“There’s nothing wrong with getting out and voting. … They voted during World War I and World War II,” Trump told Bartiromo.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pushed back Thursday in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“In the legislation we had $25 billion,” Pelosi said. “That is the number that is recommended by the Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service. … In earlier covid bills, the president has stood in the way of any money for the Postal Service.”
Pelosi noted that the among other things, the Postal Service delivers many prescriptions, which is particularly important in pandemic times.
“So they’re hurting seniors; it’s a health issue. … So, when the president goes after the Postal Service, he’s going after an all-American, highly approved-by-the-public institution,” she said.
The campaign of presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden criticized Trump’s statement, saying Trump was “sabotaging a basic service that hundreds of millions of people rely upon.”
“This is an assault on our democracy and economy by a desperate man who’s terrified that the American people will force him to confront what he’s done everything in his power to escape for months -- responsibility for his own actions,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.
The US Postal Service is one of those constitutionally required things, and Trump is happy to destroy it if it keeps him in power. That's literally all that matters to him. He doesn't care how many of his own voters are hurt by the destruction of mail delivery in America.
And again, Trump wouldn't be saying this if he believed for a second that he hasn't already won this battle, and that the rest of the GOP will now be forced to go along with wrecking the Postal Service. He now expects the GOP to be in lockstep attacking your local Post Office, and the consequences will be political annihilation for those who don't play along.
President Trump on Thursday warned that GOP Senate candidates who don't fully embrace him will lose their elections, a warning shot to some moderates who have kept their distance from the president.
Trump called into Maria Bartiromo's show on Fox Business Network, where he predicted Republicans would take back control of the House despite little polling to support that argument. But he acknowledged it may be more difficult for the GOP to maintain its slim majority in the Senate.
"We’re fighting very hard in the Senate. I’ll be honest, the Senate is tough," Trump said. "We have a couple of people that aren’t as supportive of Trump as they should be, and those people are going to lose their elections."
"The ones that don’t support, and I’m just talking, take a look ... you have a few people that want to be cute, and those people are going to lose their elections," Trump added. "And that’s a problem for the Senate."
Trump is getting more and more desperate, more and more overt in his authoritarianism and anti-democratic actions. We're going to have to defeat him both because of these actions and in spite of them.
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