Do Trump’s actions and words reflect his views about the USPS, views differ

Margaret Sullivan sums up the crisis Trump is inflicting on the USPS:

Listen to President Trump long enough, and, despite his penchant for falsehood, you’ll eventually hear some unvarnished truth.

That happened Thursday when he stated his intentions clearly in an interview with Fox Business Network. He doesn’t want to approve billions in emergency funding for the cash-strapped and struggling U.S. Postal Service for a simple reason: Democrats want to expand mail-in voting during the pandemic.

His words were stark: “Now, they need that money in order to have the Post Office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots.” He added that holding back funding means “they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it.”

In other words, he doesn’t want American citizens, fearful of exposure to the coronavirus, to have every opportunity to vote in November.

It’s not his first effort to cripple the Postal Service, one of the most essential — and popular — institutions in America. His statements Thursday came after he installed a Republican megadonor, Louis DeJoy, as the new postmaster general. In turn, DeJoy has unseated dozens of veteran postal officials. He and his minions have banned overtime and told carriers to leave mail behind at distribution centers, letting it pile up for days. Sorting machines that speed mail processing have been removed.

However, the Libertarian Fonz says that this is all overblown:

In any case, as NPR and other outlets have reported, the president has said he’d sign a bill including more funding for the Postal Service, including aid dedicated to processing any surge in mail-in votes.

If you ignore the fact that Trump’s supporters in the Senate strongly oppose funding, that Trump has explicitly opposed funding, and the fact that most of Trump’s sabotage isn’t about a lack of funding per se, he’s actually the best friend the United States Postal Service ever had!

The compelling evidence just keeps coming:

So if the USPS screws up delivering votes in a timely and efficient manner this fall, it won’t be because of any sinister actions by the White House. It will be because of longstanding, well-documented managerial and cultural problems that gave rise to such stock portrayals of letter carriers as Seinfeld‘s Newman and Cheers‘ Cliff Clavin.

Trump isn’t damaging the USPS because it is already bad, as we already know from fictional sitcom mailmen. Sit on it!