Trump: Clearly I'm Screwing With The Post Office To Sabotage The Election

[Nevilledog]

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/08/trump-clearly-im-screwing-with-the-post-office-to-sabotage-the-election


Unable to postpone the election he seems poised to lose, Donald Trump has been working to derail the mail-in voting many Americans will rely on to safely cast ballots this fall in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. But while he’s railed against the surge of mail-in ballots in public, falsely claiming it will result in widespread fraud, his efforts to undermine the postal service on which such voting depends have been less explicit, with the cuts his handpicked crony has implemented at the embattled agency framed as cost-cutting measures rather than sabotage.

Speaking to Fox Business on Thursday morning, however, the president made clear what his shenanigans at the USPS are really about—hamstringing the agency so it can’t handle the influx of ballots. “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 told Maria Bartiromo, referring to funding requests for vote-by-mail and the postal service he and Capitol Hill Republicans have stood against in coronavirus relief negotiations. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting.”

The remarks more or less constituted an admission that he’s trying to starve an essential government service to wreak havoc on the election system, all based on easily-disproved, self-serving lies about mail-in voting. The effort is astonishingly corrupt and anti-democratic, but it’s also pretty much all he’s got going for him in his uphill reelection campaign. The coronavirus crisis continues to roil the nation, and his attempts to play it down have been embarrassingly unconvincing. “It’s going to be going away,” Trump told Bartiromo Thursday. (Though that same forecast of his has proved wrong time and again, he insisted Thursday that he’s been “pretty good at predicting things.”) The economic recovery Trump was counting on is sputtering, and the administration’s attempts to spin it in his favor have been laughable. Meanwhile, he’s struggling to find a compelling argument against Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s running mate, and has instead resorted to ugly racist and misogynistic attacks.

Playing on Americans’ bigotries could prove depressingly effective. Then again, calling Harris a “mad woman,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “not even a smart person,” and MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski a “ditzy airhead,” as he did just on Thursday morning, might backfire on him with the “suburban housewives” he’s been trying to appeal to with his brazen racist fearmongering. In any case, with his characteristically unhinged remarks on Fox and Twitter Thursday morning, he essentially proved the point Biden and Harris made at their first joint appearance as running mates Wednesday: That he’s unstable, not up to the task of governing, and is capable only of “whining.”

*snip*

[Foolacious]

1. I don't think the Squatter is actually trying to win by suppressing vote-by-mail.

After all, he'll be supressing about as many votes for him as against him.

Rather, I think he's trying to throw everything into question and chaos. He'll claim the vote is illegitimate no matter what, and he'll use the ruin he himself has wrought at the USPS as his evidence. His base will believe it, the Republicans in Congress and in statehouses will go along with it, and he'll try to remain president under the threat of literal civil war if he is turned out of office.

[enough]

4. That too. NT

[ForgoTheConsequence]

2. Good thing Congress is on vacation.

Trump would be getting a strongly worded letter about election fraud and treason.

[JudyM]

3. Time for our trusty media to insist he and mcconman answer the hard questions about this.

As if.

[LisaL]

5. Yes, he admitted it freely.

He doesn't want USPS to have funds, because without funds it can't do universal voting by mail.