Day 1,415: In effort to aid Trump’s election prospects, the postmaster general gutted the USPS. Trump is now blaming him for the loss.
Donald Trump tapped Louis DeJoy to be postmaster general in May. DeJoy became just the fifth postmaster general to leave the private sector to take the job in the past 50 years.
DeJoy, a longtime Republican crony, who has tens of millions of dollars in investments in USPS competitors, immediately got to work on behalf of Trump.
On Day 1,302, we detailed what the plan was. It largely related to trying to swing the election in Trump favor. Knowing that mail-in votes were likely to skew heavily Democratic — both historically and based on Trump’s baseless insistence that such method was untrustworthy — dismantling the system became an administrative objective.
Trump knows he’s down in the race to Joe Biden and is desperately seeking a path to victory. He and his team have largely settled on the disenfranchisement of voters from coast-to-coast.
Seeing that he can’t do much about states choosing how they expand voting rights, Trump has chosen to cripple the United States Postal Service, triggering lengthy delays that may make wide-scale mail-in voting — during a pandemic, no less — impossible. He isn’t even bothering to hide the reasons behind his latest decisions.
During an interview on Fox News, Trump said that if USPS does not receive the additional $25 billion funding request that Democrats included in the ongoing stimulus negotiations, then he believes the Post Office won’t be able to handle the influx of mail-in ballots in the upcoming election.
If Trump was the hammer, DeJoy was his nail.
For reasons unexplained, the USPS is dismantling a number of vital mail sorting machines, which will make employees’ work much harder and add a significant amount of time to delivery of mail.
The United States Postal Service is removing mail sorting machines from facilities around the country without any official explanation or reason given, Motherboard has learned through interviews with postal workers and union officials. In many cases, these are the same machines that would be tasked with sorting ballots, calling into question promises made by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy that the USPS has “ample capacity” to handle the predicted surge in mail-in ballots.
In the days before the election, DeJoy was ordered by a federal judge to expand election mail deliveries.
The day of the election, DeJoy was ordered to search USPS facilities for undelivered ballots. DeJoy brazenly ignored the order.
In short, Trump giddily watched DeJoy set the USPS ablaze and still came up short on Election Day. A month later, it’s Trump blaming DeJoy and the USPS for losing the election.
Trump’s tweet is riddled with lies: there’s no evidence of ballots being tampered with, much less hundreds of thousands of ballots; the department is run by a staunch Republican, handpicked by Trump; there’s no evidence that swing states had more irregularities than non-swing states (the latter never drawing nearly the same scrutiny as purple states); and there is no evidence for any of Trump’s allegations, as he has largely been swept out of court in his various legal challenges.
His Friday tweet continues a pattern: out of Democrats to blame, Trump is pointing the finger and fuming at those closest to him.
1,415 days in, 47 to go
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