Donald Trump is trying to steal the election
He's breaking democracy by breaking the Post Office


Across much of the country, the United States Postal Service is grinding to a halt. In cities like Baltimore, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Philadelphia, residents report that they have not gotten mail for weeks. People are not getting checks, bills, medicines, or other vital necessities, and it only seems to be getting worse.
Now, with record numbers of Americans set to vote by mail this November, the Post Office is falling apart because Donald Trump thinks he can steal the election by breaking it. There is no other reason.
To be sure, the USPS has had its struggles for some time. As I've noted before, in 2006 Congress clapped the agency with an absurd requirement that it had to pre-fund its retiree health benefits 75 years out — meaning it had to set health care money aside for future employees who weren't even born yet. This drove it immediately into deficit, where it has largely remained for the past 14 years. Second, the coronavirus pandemic also hit traditional mail delivery volume hard. Junk mail advertising — one of the Post Office's key revenue sources — always falls in a recession, and with people largely staying home, there was even less call for it.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Nevertheless, neither of these things are enough to cause the problems we are seeing across the country. The decline in junk mail was partly offset by a steep rise in package shipping. More importantly, Trump also prevented the Post Office from getting $75 billion from Congress as part of the CARES Act by threatening a veto. With that help — a tiny fraction of what big corporations got — the USPS for sure could have managed through the rest of the year. Instead, it got only a $10 billion loan, with stiff conditions.
What's more, Louis DeJoy, the Trump lickspittle and longtime Republican donor (with a massive financial conflict of interest) now serving as postmaster general, has royally messed up mail service. He implemented a bunch of management changes weeks ago, including orders to restrict overtime, slow down delivery routes, and leave mail behind at distribution centers. Now he has made further sweeping changes that have sidelined longtime USPS staff and centralized power around himself, and instructed states that they will have to pay extra to prioritize their election mail. According to memos obtained by The Associated Press, even greater reductions and the complete closure of some offices could be on the way.
The rationalization for all these changes, according to the management consultant Newspeak, is that it's simply what must be done to cut costs and streamline the agency for modern times. It's classic "government should be run like a business" rhetoric. But it stands to reason that when someone says they are trying to improve the efficiency of a service, and the efficiency of that service immediately collapses so badly as to virtually cease to exist in big chunks of the country — particularly big cities, which is where the Post Office makes most of its revenue — that was not what they were really trying to do.
So let's turn back to the president. Trump has been telling hysterical lies about mail-in voting for months, falsely portraying it as riddled with fraud, and repeatedly suggesting that the November election tally will not be legitimate as a result. As anyone who thinks about it for five seconds could confirm, simply voting through the mail is no more vulnerable to fraud than doing it in person, because any single person would be a fool to commit a felony for a single vote. In terms of fraud potential, mail-in voting is not meaningfully different from the absentee voting that Trump favors — most of the time, it actually happens through the mail.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Real vote fraud happens when political parties control the count. Indeed, the biggest recent example of actual tinpot dictatorship-style election rigging was committed by a North Carolina Republican operative, Leslie McCrae Dowless, on behalf of Mark Harris, GOP candidate for the state's 9th District in 2018. The local GOP and Harris's campaign knew about credible allegations of absentee ballot tampering but sued to have Harris installed in office anyway based on the crooked vote.
So here we have a postal service that has been hamstrung at every turn by the president, whose crony running the agency has turned it into a shambles, and which will almost certainly struggle to get ballots delivered in a timely fashion. We also have a president who is notorious for lying, cheating, and stealing; who is far behind in the polls; who may well face prosecution after leaving office on account of the crimes he has confessed to doing; and whose campaign has sued Nevada over switching to universal vote-by-mail, as well as Pennsylvania to stop the state from setting up vote drop boxes. It doesn't take a master detective to put the pieces together on this one. (I am currently making plans to drop my ballot off in person, and I suggest you do the same.)
The true talents of Donald Trump can be counted on the fingers of one hand, but one of his most well-developed skills is breaking things and turning the resulting disaster to his own advantage. If he succeeds in wrecking the Post Office, enough Democrats may be unable to vote that he will be able to steal the election. Or if it takes weeks or months for Joe Biden to be declared the winner, Trump will very likely lie about all of Biden's votes being fake, and claim victory for himself. Who is president next year may depend on which side the military takes.
Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.
-
How clean-air efforts may have exacerbated global warming
Under the Radar Air pollution artificially cooled the Earth, ‘masking’ extent of temperature increase
-
September 14 editorial cartoons
Cartoons Sunday’s political cartoons include RFK Jr on the hook, the destruction of discourse, and more
-
Air strikes in the Caribbean: Trump’s murky narco-war
Talking Point Drug cartels ‘don’t follow Marquess of Queensberry Rules’, but US military air strikes on speedboats rely on strained interpretation of ‘invasion’
-
Air strikes in the Caribbean: Trump’s murky narco-war
Talking Point Drug cartels ‘don’t follow Marquess of Queensberry Rules’, but US military air strikes on speedboats rely on strained interpretation of ‘invasion’
-
Brazil’s Bolsonaro sentenced to 27 years for coup attempt
Speed Read Bolsonaro was convicted of attempting to stay in power following his 2022 election loss
-
Calls for both calm and consequences follow Kirk killing
TALKING POINTS The suspected assassination of far-right activist Charlie Kirk has some public figures pleading for restraint, while others agitate for violent reprisals
-
Why does Donald Trump keep showing up at major sporting events?
Today's Big Question Trump has appeared at the Super Bowl, the Daytona 500 and other events
-
‘Democracy is under threat globally’
Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
Former top FBI agents sue, claiming Trump purge
Speed Read The agents alleged they were targeted by a “campaign of retribution”
-
Why does Trump keep interfering in the NYC mayoral race?
Today's Big Question The president has seemingly taken an outsized interest in his hometown elections, but are his efforts to block Zohran Mamdani about political expediency or something deeper?
-
Judge lets Cook stay at Fed while appealing ouster
Speed Read Trump had attempted to fire Cook over allegations of mortgage fraud