The US Postal Service, the White House Coronavirus Task Force (led by Mike Pence) and several textile manufacturers had a plan ready to go in April to deliver reusable cloth masks -- some 650 million -- to every postal household in America, starting in states with large outbreaks like New York and New Jersey.
Trump killed the plan because it would "ensure panic", fired then Postmater General Megan Brennan, and had Louis DeJoy appointed two months later.
It would be months before Louis DeJoy took the reins of the nation’s mail system, and the U.S. Postal Service already was mired in crisis.
Mail carriers were revolting, fearful they had few protections against the newly emerging coronavirus. The Trump administration was bearing down on its finances, sending USPS officials scrambling over what they saw as a potential illegal takeover of agency operations. And then there was a looming standoff with Amazon, which privately signaled it could take some of its lucrative delivery business elsewhere.
The tensions surfaced at an April 9 meeting, when Amazon executives “stated their concerns” about the Postal Service’s economic plight amid the pandemic and questioned its “viability to them as a continued shipping partner,” according to a once-secret memo circulated within the agency, which described the situation as an “inflection point.” (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
The wide-ranging headaches that so troubled the USPS in April ultimately foreshadowed a summer of upheaval, thrusting the once-venerated mail service into a political maelstrom months before a presidential election. Newly disclosed details of these struggles are laid bare in nearly 10,000 pages of emails, legal memos, presentations and other documents obtained by The Washington Post from American Oversight, a watchdog group that requested them under the Freedom of Information Act.
The documents, which mostly span March and April, depict an agency in distress, as its deteriorating finances collided with a public-health emergency and a looming election that would be heavily reliant on absentee ballots. During that period, the USPS occasionally relied on the legal counsel of well-connected Republicans, including Stefan C. Passantino, who once served as a top White House lawyer under President Trump. Passantino, whose role has not been previously reported, is also part of a new pro-Trump legal coalition preparing for the possibility of a contested election, a relationship that has raised new ethical flags among the administration’s critics.
Read the scrapped USPS announcement to send 5 masks to every American household
The records also offer fresh detail about the Postal Service’s precarious position in the White House’s early pandemic response. At one point in April, USPS leaders drafted a news release announcing plans to distribute 650 million masks nationwide, enough to offer five face coverings to every American household. The document, which includes quotations from top USPS officials and other specifics, was never sent. But it suggests that the government’s initial interest in tapping the Postal Service as part of its campaign to combat the coronavirus may have been far more advanced than initially reported this spring.
The Postal Service declined to discuss its specific dealings with the White House, Treasury Department or Amazon about plans to distribute masks or its finances. David Partenheimer, a USPS spokesman, stressed in a statement that the mail agency is “firmly committed to being a source of constancy and reliability in every community.”
“Our more than 630,000 employees are working to make sure our customers can depend on us,” he added. “We’re on the front lines — delivering needed medicines, supplies, benefit checks, financial statements and the important correspondence every family counts on.”
But the emails and other records offer fresh insight about the Postal Service, its philosophical shifts and the little-known board of governors overseeing its operations and finances. Lawmakers already have trained their attention on board leader Robert M. Duncan, a top Republican financier, for his political ties. The board later picked DeJoy, whose support for Trump, history of GOP fundraising and controversial USPS cost-cutting moves have stoked widespread criticism.
Trump could have saved thousands of lives, but he didn't want to.
He didn't want to admit the federal government had any responsibility in additional role to play other than giving out respirators that were already stockpiled and making governors responsible for them.
He didn't want to be seen as responsible for a problem he had already admitted was going to "go away" in a matter of weeks.
Most of all, he didn't want to help poor people who didn't have masks in blue states. He wanted them to all get sick and die for the sin of not voting for him. They weren't human to him, just vermin to be eradicated. He made sure that not only this plan was going to die screaming, he replaced the Postmaster General to make sure it would never happen.
The man is a monster.
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