Here’s what I don’t get: How can the criminal-in-chief possibly believe that sabotaging the popular U.S. Postal Service – on the eve of an election in the midst of a pandemic, no less – will endear him to voters?
I’m serious about calling him a criminal. According to federal law (18 U.S.C. 1701), “Whoever knowingly and willfully obstructs or retards the passage of the mail, or any carrier or conveyance carrying the mail, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned.” That 1948 law was passed by a Republican House and Republican Senate.
And I’m serious when I refer to the Postal Service as popular. It was founded in 1775 as the U.S. Post Office; it’s not partisan to support the timely delivery of mail. According to an April poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, our mail folks enjoy an approval rating of 91 percent. That’s roughly 50 points higher than Trump’s.
So it’s a mystery why he thinks that messing with the mails will benefit him politically. Granted, he has no clue how real people live, so maybe it hasn’t occurred to him (and his tremulous advisers are too afraid to tell him) that tens of millions of Americans – the sick, the jobless, the seniors, the veterans – depend on the prompt delivery of their medications and unemployment benefits and Social Security checks.
Even Fox News posted a warning this weekend on its website: “Any Republican who is thinking that this kind of (sabotage) is not going to be the most politically boneheaded move…that the president has made in a really long time is fooling themselves.”
True that. Last I checked, every red state and every red district has millions of normally Republican voters who depend on a functioning postal service. Seniors in particular (age 65 and up) typically vote Republican (as they did in 2016, favoring Trump by seven points), but there’s no better way for Trump to alienate seniors in the ’20 election than to screw with their meds and benefits. Heck, seniors have already been defecting in droves to Joe Biden (most notably in Florida) thanks to Trump’s murderous pandemic performance; how can he possibly think that slowing the mail will help him recoup?
Voters who live in rural communities have been among Trump’s staunchest supporters. But rural citizens are particularly dependent on the postal service. They won’t suddenly embrace Biden, but their enthusiasm for Trump may well be dimmed by his impulse to go postal.
So why would he do something so potentially self-destructive? How can he possibly benefit politically from the VA’s warning that vets aren’t getting their meds on time? Or from the fact that his coveted “suburban housewives” – stuck in the house with kids thanks to his pandemic – need to wait days on end for the house supplies they badly need?
By this point we’re all experts in Trumpian psychology. The simplest answer is that he’s screwing with the postal service because he’s flop-sweat desperate to stay in office and out of jail. He basically admitted it the other day when he said that his goal is to cripple mail balloting by withholding the necessary federal money: “Now, they need that money in order to have the post officer work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” but if he blocks the money, “they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it.”
So the challenge to the citizenry is obvious: Are we going to roll over for this most blatant of Putinesque abuses?
William McRaven, a retired Navy admiral and former leader of the U.S. Special Operations Command, says there’s also a method to Trump’s madness. He frames the big picture: “Trump is actively working to undermine every major institution in this country. He has planted the seeds of doubt in the minds of many Americans that our institutions aren’t functioning properly. And if the president doesn’t trust the intelligence community, law enforcement, the press, the military, the Supreme Court, the medical professionals, election officials and the postal workers, then why should we? And if Americans stop believing in the system of institutions, then what is left but chaos and who can bring order out of chaos: only Trump. It is the theme of every autocrat who ever seized power or tried to hold onto it.”
If the benighted citizens of Belarus can protest en masse against their two-decade tyrant, then surely we can retaliate against Trump and mobilize for our mail.