President Trump is waging a war against the U.S. Postal Service in an effort to steal the upcoming election, according to Democrats and several mainstream media outlets. The evidence? Out-of-context pictures submitted randomly and a general misunderstanding about the post office’s lack of funding.
Now, several states are considering taking the Trump administration to court, House Democrats have demanded an immediate congressional hearing with the postmaster general, and hundreds of thousands of people have been led to believe that their votes will not be received because of coordinated malevolence.
Let’s call this what it is: a conspiracy theory — one that conveniently gives Democrats a reason to contest the election’s results if Trump wins.
This conspiracy began circulating online after the Postal Service warned election officials in 46 states about several scenarios in which ballots would not arrive in time to be counted due to “inconsistencies” with delivery service and state deadlines. There was nothing strange or unusual about this warning. It is a simple fact that the Postal Service does not deliver every single piece of mail on time, and that problem will undoubtedly get worse if the majority of the country decides to change its voting system overnight.
But the post office never said it could not handle the influx of mail-in ballots — only that there could be potential delays and/or logistical errors. Think of it as a heads-up.
Democrats, however, accelerated their theory after photos of post office mailboxes being removed in various parts of the country began to circulate online:
A reader from Ohio sends me this picture. #SaveTheUSPS pic.twitter.com/tbTddu8GHH
— Molly Jong-Fast? (@MollyJongFast) August 16, 2020
The USPS is literally backing up trucks to mailboxes and taking them away. Here are photos of mailboxes being “decommissioned” in SE Portland and Eugene, Ore. Check out how many are already on the trucks! But today’s news is probably going to be about “golden showers” instead. pic.twitter.com/qROzgpZS0P
— Janet Harris, M.P.Aff. (@ThinkUpstream) August 13, 2020
“They’re going around literally with tractor-trailers picking up mailboxes,” presidential candidate Joe Biden said during a virtual fundraiser over the weekend. “You ought to go online and check out what they’re doing in Oregon. I mean, it’s bizarre.”
The Postal Service clarified that collecting mailboxes is standard practice that allows the service to repair, replace, or relocate mailboxes. Biden should know that. After all, more than 14,000 mailboxes were removed during former President Barack Obama’s administration between 2011 and 2016. But Democrats didn’t blink an eye then, nor did they seem to care when Obama proposed that the Postal Service slash 12,000 jobs in 2016.
The difference now, of course, is that Democrats have a narrative to promote and a villain to pin it on: Trump. They’ve accused him of intentionally sabotaging emergency funding for the Postal Service to make sure the service is crippled and mail-in ballots are not delivered on time. Apparently, Trump fanatics aren’t the only ones who think the president is always three steps ahead.
Trump, per usual, has not helped himself. In fact, it almost seems as if he wants the Democrats’ accusations to be true.
“They want $25 billion for the post office,” Trump said last week. “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. 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.”
This is ridiculous, and the Postal Service should get the funding if it needs it. But Trump isn’t the one to blame for its lack of funding: Congress is. Our lawmakers have made it impossible for the Postal Service to break even, let alone turn any kind of profit. The service is required by law to operate six days a week, it cannot invest its assets in anything except U.S. Treasurys, and it’s forced to cap its prices at the rate of inflation. As a result, the Postal Service has been hemorrhaging money for years.
But the fact is that the Postal Service does not need additional funding just for this election. As Byron York noted on Monday, the service already received billions of dollars in emergency funding when Congress passed its CARES Act, and Congress also appropriated billions for the states’ election use. The Postal Service has even admitted it won’t run out of cash until 2021.
Besides, if the Postal Service can deliver more than 3 billion pieces of mail the week before Christmas every year without additional funding, it can certainly deliver the 150 to 250 million mail-in ballots it will receive this November without an additional $25 billion.
The Democrats know this just as well as anyone, but they’re so eager to see malevolence where there is none that they’ve created a baseless conspiracy that has thousands of people in a tizzy.
