Now we know. Vulnerable people locked down aren't getting food and medicine and essential goods because that might help Trump in the November election, according to Trump. Not only that, all stimulus funding in the US is held up so he can starve the postal service of funds to operate and the states of the money they need to run the election.
Trump admits he is undermining USPS to make it harder to vote by mail
Donald Trump admitted on Thursday he opposed additional funding for the United States Postal Service (USPS) in order to make it more difficult to deliver mail-in ballots. Trump’s comments lend evidence for critics who say the president is deliberately trying to hamstring the USPS in advance of the November elections to help his re-election bid.
Trump said on Thursday that congressional negotiations over stimulus aid were held up in part because of Democratic proposals to provide $3.6bn to states to run elections and $25bn in aid to the postal service. The president, who has falsely claimed that widespread mail-in voting will lead to fraud, suggested that without the funding it would be harder to vote by mail.“They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. “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.”
Congress has allocated just $400m to help states run elections, a small fraction of the $4bn the Brennan Center for Justice estimates is needed this year...
The president’s comments also come amid accusations that Louis DeJoy, the new postmaster general and a major Republican donor, is making cuts at the agency to intentionally slow down the mail. There are reports of severe mail delays in places across the country and the Washington Post and other news organizations published internal USPS documents last month saying there was a blanket ban on overtime and that workers were being told to leave mail behind if it will delay them on their routes...
A slower mail service could have a big impact this fall because an unprecedented number of Americans are expected to vote by mail and
many states require a ballot to arrive at an election office by election day, regardless of when it was put in the mail, in order to be counted.
At least 65,000 ballots were rejected during the 2020 primaries because they arrived too late.
“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. Sort of a crazy thing,” Trump said on Thursday.
Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said in a statement Trump was attacking the US economy and democracy. “
The president of the United States is sabotaging a basic service that hundreds of millions of people rely upon, cutting a critical lifeline for rural economies and for delivery of medicines, because he wants to deprive Americans of their fundamental right to vote safely during the most catastrophic public health crisis in over 100 years,” he said.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/13/donald-trump-usps-post-office-election-funding
