Mail Order Coup d’Etat

President Trump Blocks Post Office Funding in Order to Foil Mail-in Voting–And Admits It

What could look at first glance like a routine budgetary measure at the United States Postal Service might well be Phase Three–or Four or Seven–depending upon when you start counting–of a fascist-style takeover of the United States government. By the President’s own admission, the object of cutting back funding is to debilitate and slow down the mail service to the point where it is incapable of processing mail-in votes in time to be counted. Insofar as the taproot of American democracy is free and fair elections, any form of tampering with those elections is an attack on the United States as a democratic country as we know it. In greater or lesser decree it’s treason, a coup d’etat.

And Trump’s post-office ploy is just that. What’s left of his White House brain trust suspects that permitting mail-in voting would be detrimental to his re-election, as it would encourage the votes of the the minorities, the disadvantaged, the elderly and other demographics who suspect that he may not be “making American great again.” Trump, or someone who thinks for him, actually prepared the ground for subverting the postal service and, by extension, the 2020 presidential election. In a move that insiders consider contrary to political etiquette–that’s what they have in Washington instead of ethics, “etiquette”–the Trump-inspired USPS Board of Governors appointed one of his substantial campaign contributors/fund raisers (to the tune of $2 million) to run the United States Postal Service.

The new U.S. Postmaster General and CEO, Louis DeJoy, besides being a Trump crony, is also a businessman who, along with his wife, has somewhere between $30.1 million and $75.3 million invested in USPS competitors or contractors. There was some murmuring in Washington about conflict of interest at the time, but nobody took it too seriously. DeJoy is also the first postmaster general in more than 20 years with no prior experience in the postal service.

A bit of United States Postal Service history from SYRadio on The Independent:

In the early days of the United State the Post Office was considered vital to the growth of the new country. The economy depended on reliable mail service. The Post Office was even charged with building roads to facilitate the delivery of mail. The Post Master General was a cabinet level official. Then in 1971 Richard Nixon converted the USPS into a quasi government corporation. It was expected to at least break even. This was the start of a fiscal crisis that continues today. We need to make the post office a government agency again. We don’t expect the Pentagon to operate at a profit. Why do we insist on the USPS doing so? Now the situation has been politicized partly to serve the re-election of Donald Trump. This is a threat to the security of the United States. 

Shakeup or Shakedown?

On August 7, 2020, DeJoy announced he had reassigned or displaced 23 senior USPS officials, including the two top executives overseeing day-to-day operations. Oblivious to the distinction between business and public service, DeJoy said he was trying to breathe new life into a “broken business model.” Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, who chairs the House committee that oversees the post office, said the reorganization was “deliberate sabotage.” So, with the man at the top already predisposed in his favor, what was Trump’s solution? Surprise, it’s simple! Just disable the postal service.

CommonDreams.org reports that the president declared last Wednesday:

The U.S. Postal Service doesn’t have the capacity to handle an unprecedented increase in mail-in ballots because it lacks funds that his administration is blocking, remarks that were immediately viewed as an open admission of election sabotage by a president who has previously called USPS “a joke.”

Trump dismissed Democratic congressional leaders’ demands for $3.5 billion in election assistance for states and $25 billion for USPS as “ridiculous” and vowed to continue blocking the funds. “Therefore, they don’t have the money to do the universal mail-in voting. So therefore, they can’t do it,” said the president, who repeated his false claim that mail-in voting is highly susceptible to fraud and added, “How are they going to do it if they don’t have the money to do it?”

That clearly enunciated strategy, coupled with a few other voter supression gambits like closing polling stations in anti-Trump areas , gerrymandering, tampering with electronic vote tallying machines (the case in the state of Georgia 2014-2017), and various forms of disenfranchisement should get the job done. The Washington Post said:

Anticipating an avalanche of absentee ballots, the U.S. Postal Service recently sent detailed letters to 46 states and D.C. warning that it cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted — adding another layer of uncertainty ahead of the high-stakes presidential contest.

Will Trump Go to Any Extreme?

This lively mail-in-voting controversy leads some observers to wonder just how far–or how low–President Trump might go in order to secure his re-election. Would he reactivate his armed white-superiority activists on the streets? Would he intensify his efforts to subvert the electoral process? Would he fill the streets of American cities with “federal agents,” or even soldiers? There’s not much mystery in these questions, as he’s done them all already. It’s almost as if his campaign strategy all along has been a rehearsal for more serious voting obstruction as election day approaches. It might be relevant that the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, four-star General Mark Milley,  was named to the post by Trump in 2018 and is very much in syntony with the president.

The latest news on the president’s efforts to “make Trump great again” came at midday on Sunday (8/16/2020) from CNN analyst,  Maeve Reston, who notes that Trump is “attempting to shift blame for US Postal Service funding problems to Democrats and refusing to acknowledge his administration’s efforts to undermine the agency three months before Election Day.”

Democrats Consider Pushing Back

We expect our elected officials to protect the right to vote and to ensure every vote is counted. This attack on the Postal Service —an institution as old as the Republic itself and depended upon, and trusted by, millions of Americans— is designed to ensure that neither is done.

Author: Michael Booth

Michael Booth, the creator of TrumpAndAllTheRest.com, is a US-born publicist, author and online publisher who has lived in a Spanish village in the foothills of Sierra Nevada for the past five decades. Though better known abroad for his fine-art printmaking sites and online magazine, Booth's day job for the past decade and a half, until recently, was his communications agency, dedicated principally to designing and implementing Internet strategies for Spanish companies and institutions. It took him a long time to get out of publicity and into writing but it was worth the wait. View all posts by Michael Booth