Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Trump says sabotaging mail vote is his reason for blocking USPS bailout

President Donald Trump, mail voting

President Trump explaining to reporters Wednesday his plan to prevent widespread absentee balloting by denying additional funding to the Postal Service.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

With bombast, exaggeration and outright falsehoods, President Trump has made perfectly clear for months his view that expanded mail voting will assure the election is rigged against him. He's taken a fresh tack in the past 24 hours: Declaring that he's committed to defunding the Postal Service so it can't handle the coming surge of ballot envelopes.

His remarks to reporters Wednesday evening, which he expanded on Thursday, marked Trump's first explicit commitment to starve the cash-strapped USPS, still a backbone of the American economy, in order to do what he asserts is best for his own re-election prospects — not for smoothing the exercise of electoral democracy during a national crisis.

Trump said he is not willing to negotiate on either the $25 billion infusion the Postal Service says it needs to keep up with its workload starting in October — when the volume of absentee applications and completed vote-by-mail ballots will start to peak — or the $3.5 billion states say they need to conduct healthy, comprehensive and reliable elections during the pandemic.


"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," Trump said in an interview Thursday on the Fox Business Network. "Now, if we don't make a deal, that means they don't get the money. That means they can't have universal mail-in voting, they just can't have it."

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

"It's their fault," Trump said of the Democrats in explaining his reason for totally rejecting the extra help they want to give the states, along with permission to spend the money on either mail-in or in-person election operations. "They want $3.5 billion for something that's fraudulent."

He made similar assertions at a White House briefing Wednesday. He also argued then, without evidences that allowing the USPS to play a central role in the election would mean the quasi-governmental agency was helping perpetuate "one of the greatest frauds in history."

His comments came as Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump campaign donor on the job only since this summer, unveiled another sweeping overhaul, including replacing the top two executives and nearly two dozen other agency leaders.

He had earlier directed USPS to make a series of cost-cutting moves, including eliminating most overtime and mandating that mail is kept until the next day if distribution centers are running late. On Wednesday 175 House Democrats pressed him to reverse those changes, especially an edict that election mailings no longer get automatically handled as first class.

"If implemented now, as the election approaches, this policy will cause further delays to election mail that will disenfranchise voters and put significant financial pressure on election jurisdictions," they said.

The Postal Service had been struggling for many years but reported last week that it had lost more than $2 billion in just April, May and June, largely because of declining mail volume attributed to the pandemic.

Trump's disparagement of mail-in voting as an invitation to fraud gained fresh pushback from an unlikely source: Republican Gov. Gary Herbert of Utah, the only reliably red state among the five that had switched to almost entirely mail-in elections before the Covid-19 outbreak.

"We have a really good system here," he told a Fox TV affiliate Tuesday in lauding a process in place for seven years, explaining that he recently delivered the same message to Vice President Mike Pence. "We really have seen no example of someone trying to game the system or cheat."

One in four votes in the last presidential election were cast using an absentee ballot. Predictions show that share could double or even triple in the fall, which would mean more than 100 million ballots coursing through the mail.

The fight over the USPS and election grant money has become one of the biggest flashpoints in the negotiations over the latest coronavirus economic recovery package, which essentially collapsed last week.

Congressional leaders of both parties, in both the House and Senate, now say it's unrealistic to expect talks will be revived in time for a deal before the middle of next month. At that point, if there is a new round of grants to the states, they will have only six weeks to spend the money expanding their print runs on mail-in ballots, buttressing their vote tabulating operations, hiring election workers or buying supplies to make voting sites more sanitary.

"Trump is purposely sabotaging the post office to make it harder for millions of Americans to safely cast their ballot in the middle of a public health crisis," said Tiffany Muller of the progressive group Let America Vote, which has been part of the coalition pushing Congress for the election subsidies. "It would be outrageous for any elected official to actively suppress the vote, but it's unconscionable to see these actions from the president."

Denying money to the Postal Service could create bigger political problems for the president than it solves, his critics say. Mail carriers deliver millions of prescriptions annually, for example, especially to elderly people whose votes are central to his formula for winning a second term.

"It's a health issue," Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday on MSNBC. "When the president goes after the Postal Service, he's going after an all-American, highly approved-by-the-public institution," she said.

The campaign for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, meanwhile, said Trump would rue the day he committed to "sabotaging a basic service that hundreds of millions of people rely upon."

The president has been railing without evidence that "universal mail-in voting" is a sure incubator of election cheating. But that's hardly what will happen this year. Eight states, with about 46 million voters, will deliver ballots proactively this fall. About 130 million voters will be able to get an absentee ballot if they choose — including in Florida, where the president has voted by mail at least twice. The rest, 55 million voters in eight states, will need to provide an excuse beyond fear of exposure to the coronavirus.

Read More

Presidential promises, promises, promises....

Former President Donald J. Trump answers question from Pastor Paula White-Cain at the National Faith Advisory Board summit in Powder Springs, Georgia, United States on October 28, 2024.

(Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Presidential promises, promises, promises....

When Donald Trump made his first successful run for president in 2016, he made 663 promises to American voters. By the end of his 2021 term of office, he could only fulfill approximately 23 percent of his vows. Before we get too excited as to what will happen when Trump 2.0 takes effect on Jan. 20, let’s take a moment to reflect on covenants made by a couple of other presidents.

PolitiFact tracks the promises our presidents have made. PolitiFact is a non-partisan fact-checking website created in 2007 by the Florida-based Tampa Bay Times and acquired in 2018 by the Poynter Institute, a non-profit school for journalists. Here’s a report card on three presidents:

Keep ReadingShow less
A bold next step for the Democratic Party

DEMOCRATIC PARTY FLAG

Getty Images//Stock Photo

A bold next step for the Democratic Party

In order to think about the next steps for the Democratic Party and the February 1, 2025, vote for a new Democratic National Committee Chair, it is useful to remember the context of three pairs of Democratic Presidents since the 1960s.

JFK and LBJ led the way for major progressive changes, ranging from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to Affirmative Action and the War on Poverty. Johnson's Great Society was the most progressive agenda ever promoted by an American president.

Keep ReadingShow less
The 119th Congress: Some history makers, but fewer women overall

Vice President Kamala Harris presides over the electoral college vote count during a joint session of Congress in the House chamber on Monday, January 6, 2025.

(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

The 119th Congress: Some history makers, but fewer women overall

When the 119th U.S. Congress was sworn in, some newly elected women members made history.

Emily Randall, from Washington’s 6th Congressional District, is the first out LGBTQ+ Latina. Lisa Blunt Rochester and Angela Alsobrooks are the first Black senators to represent Delaware and Maryland, respectively — and the first two Black women to ever serve concurrently in the upper chamber. Sarah McBride, from Delaware’s at-large House district, is the first transgender member of Congress. All are Democrats.

Keep ReadingShow less
What can we learn in 2025 from the 100-year-old Scopes Trial?

Two groups of protesters, one blue and one red, marching with placards across an abstract American flag background.

Getty Images//Stock Photo

What can we learn in 2025 from the 100-year-old Scopes Trial?

Based on popular demand, the American Schism series will renew in 2025 with a look at science-based public policy caught in the crossfires of today’s culture wars.

Readers often send me comments on how this series effectively sheds light on our contemporary political divisions through careful examination and analysis of our own American history, since so many of our present issues are derivative of conflicts long brewing in our past. As I wrote last year on these pages, history can act as a salve for our present-day wounds if we apply it.

Keep ReadingShow less