President Donald J. Trump, aka President Extremely Stable Genius, aka President Great and Unmatched Wisdom, is notorious for anyone of a million sins. But perhaps the man’s most infamous character flaw is his propensity to prefer climbing up a tree to tell a lie over standing on the ground to tell the truth.
Even his most avid supporters – and don’t kid yourself, there’s still plenty of them out there – have a hard time rationalizing the whoppers that blast from his maw on a regular basis. Books have been written about his antipathy toward coming clean on anything and everything. It’s often led to him being described as a sociopath, which is not generally the sort of characteristic voters are looking for in the person leading the nation.
So it’s the height of irony that Trump finds himself in the most hot water when he stumbles into parts unknown, that territory that talk-show host Stephen Colbert characterizes as “truthiness.”
That’s precisely the predicament Trump finds himself as he goes to war with the U.S Postal Service, the folks who deliver the mail to American households and businesses every day but Sunday.
The NKyTribune’s Washington columnist Bill Straub served 11 years as the Frankfort Bureau chief for The Kentucky Post. He also is the former White House/political correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service. A member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, he currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and writes frequently about the federal government and politics. Email him at williamgstraub@gmail.com
Trump is mad at the USPS because Election Day is looming on the horizon and several states have decided – given the ongoing desire to limit crowds during the COVID-19 era – to let voters mail in their November ballots rather than stand in line at a polling place.
Now that may sound reasonable but in Trump world, it’s an imminent holocaust. He claims, without even scant evidence, that it renders the electoral system ripe for abuse and opens the process to fraud and chaos. There are reports that his distaste for one of the essential services provided by the federal government derives from his feeling that he lost the popular vote for president in 2016 to Democrats Hillary Clinton because of the proliferation of mail-in ballots.
His primary concern appears to be that the process makes it easier and more efficient for people to vote, a possibility that scares the pants off a president who fears the results might not bend in his direction – a legitimate concern seeing as how the RealClearPolitics polling average places his approval rating at a paltry 43.3 percent and further shows him trailing former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president, by anywhere from four to 11 points.
Trump acknowledged as much back in March when he told Fox News that greater use of voting by mail would result in “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.’’
So, in his famously well-considered manner, Trump decided to adopt the philosophy espoused in the apocryphal story concerning a Vietnam-era Army major who said his troops had to burn a village in order to save it. The president set out to destroy the postal system to forestall his potential Election Day disaster.
Doubt it? Trump said last week he opposes plans to help out the financially-troubled postal service with a $25 billion bail-out – plus an additional $3.5 billion to handle universal mail-in voting – because he wants to restrict vote by mail.
“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,” he said on the Fox Business Network. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”
Trump followed it up with this gem at a press conference: “They don’t have the money to do the universal mail-in votes. Therefore, they can’t do the universal mail-in vote. It’s very simple. How are they going to do it if they don’t have the money to do it?”
The president was already pulling the USPS asunder before voicing his intent. In June he appointed Louis DeJoy to the post of postmaster general. DeJoy immediately began implementing austerity measures, including no overtime, which prevented mail carriers from making deliveries on time in many areas, taking mail-sorting machines offline at some offices and removing numerous public mail receptacles.
This is insanity, the type of insanity the public has become inured to under a president who constantly places his own desires above the good of the nation he was elected to serve. The postal service is a troubled program, primarily because it is consistently underfunded and therefore unable to deliver on its constitutional obligations as efficiently as desired. It’s also hindered by the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which requires the organization to pre-fund future retiree health benefits rather than invest in a pay-as-you-go manner. No other agency has that requirement and it’s said to cost the USPS untold billions of dollars.
Regardless, the president’s effort to bury the postal system was not met with a universal embrace. Sometimes the check really is in the mail, and people don’t want to wait too long to cash it. A lot of folks now receive medical prescriptions through the mail along with other necessary services.
Even Republicans, who aren’t wont to cross Trump expressed misgivings. Senate Republican Leader Mitch “Root-‘n-Branch’’ McConnell, of Louisville, offered assurances that “the postal service is going to be just fine. We’re going to make sure that the ability to function going into the election is not adversely affected. I don’t share the president’s concern.”
The postal system, McConnell said, will be on “firm-footing.”
The external pressure finally reached the point where DeJoy backed down and announced that the austerity measures underway would be postponed until after the November election “to avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail.”
That doesn’t mean everyone is on board. Take Rep. James Comer, R-Tompkinsville, who, as a result of the old Peter Principle – he apparently has risen to his level of incompetence – is now the ranking member on the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Unfortunately, he isn’t up high enough in the GOP hierarchy to get the message that the administration is sounding retreat.
“The Democrats’ wild and baseless conspiracy theory about the United States Postal Service is irresponsible and only undermines the American people’s faith in the integrity of the election and our institutions,” Comer said on Monday.
Regardless of how Americans choose to vote in the 2020, Comer said, “they must have confidence that their vote counts.”
What’s interesting here is Comer is bashing Democrats for making “baseless’’ claims about the integrity of the voting process when it was his new BFF, Trump, wailing about the mail-in system and, in a tweet, raising the issue about “A Rigged Election? So bad for our Country.’’
“Universal mail-ins when you get inundated with these things are bad and will lead to terrible things including voter fraud etc.,” Trump said in a video.
And then on Tuesday Trump’s reelection campaign filed suit against the state of New Jersey after Gov. Phil Murphy signed an executive order providing voters with mail-in ballots for the November election. The Trump campaign, in a 37-page complaint, said the governor “by ordering universal vote-by-mail, he has created a recipe for disaster. Fraudulent and invalid votes dilute the votes of honest citizens.”
“A rigged election?” “Recipe for disaster?” “Fraudulent and invalid votes?” That’s all from Trump and his campaign, not House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of California, and majority Democrats. That’s Donny boy. But in Jamie world, it’s the Democrats’ spreading a “wild and baseless conspiracy theory.”
It’s not a theory, pal, it’s a fact, all laid out there by the president of your party for all the world to see except, apparently, you.
There’s a word for people like James Comer – sycophant.
I think that this mail fiasco may very be Trump’s major downfall. Now both parties are affected buy the mail slowdown and they won’t like it. I think I read somewhere that the postal service had the highest approval rating of any government entity; something on the order of 91%. Trump’s fingerprints are all over this and his Postmaster General/megadonor toady implemented it.