Op-Ed: Sabotaging the Post Office Makes the Trump Administration as Harmful to the Country As COVID-19

Like a thief in the middle of the night, Donald Trump is out to steal your vote under the cover of COVID-19. His chosen Postmaster General has ordered severe cuts and the dismantling and removal of mail sorting machines and collection boxes ahead of the election.

As President Obama said, this move is about undermining the legitimacy of an election in the middle of a pandemic. Trump himself confirmed in an interview that his ultimate aim is voter suppression. He is threatening to withhold funding the post office so that people who want to vote by mail during the pandemic do not have a chance to vote unless they risk contagion and death. That is the choice Trump is setting up for America: Your life for your vote.

Trump is out to destroy and defund the postal service to disenfranchise millions of voters so that he may steal the election. This is voter suppression before your eyes.

Had he really made America great as he has convinced his followers that he is doing, he would not have to destroy the Postal Service in order to keep people from voting. But Trump knows that is all an illusion and he is afraid people are seeing through him, so he resorts to the lowest of dirty tricks to stay in power, no matter the cost to the American people. Hobbling the Post Office will result in late paychecks, late prescriptions, and lost business and higher costs to companies that rely on the postal service for their business model.

At this time, he is not even pretending to try to help the rest of the country, it is all about himself. Sure, he will continue to lie on stage and some people will buy that the postal service had to go.

But the U.S. Post Office is a strategic asset that garners some of the world’s finest public resources and capabilities to give the country a competitive advantage in efficiency, logistics, business, and quality of life. Like the armed forces, it is there for the country, and for the defense and support of the American way of life; it is not a cheap, for-profit gig as Trump now wants to make it.

With millions of people readying to vote by mail, the U.S. Postal Service is a supporting asset of what has been the world’s greatest democracy, until Trump saw it as a way that will allow the American people to express their judgment on his dismal performance and the honesty of his words, that is.

The postal service has worked through snow, and sleet, and heat, and overcome every obstacle to deliver your mail on time, or almost on time. Now, it is underway of collapsing under undue Trump pressure. If this deliberate destruction of the backbone of services upon which millions of Americans have counted for generations is allowed to stand, then there will be no democracy left to protect. Put a banana on the flag and hoist it.

It is time for all Republicans to stop their complicity in the decimation of America. It is time for all members of Congress to make it clear this will not stand. Republicans must stop their cowardly silence or risk becoming the Petain’s of history.

This is the line he cannot cross. Congress must come together in an emergency session to protect the U.S. Postal Service, to stop the harm to the country and its citizens, and move to reverse the dismantling of the postal infrastructure. They must do their patriotic duty and override the callous and reckless administration to fund the post office with a clear directive to reinstate service to previous standards and to be ready to handle the millions of ballots for the election.

Diminishing the postal service at this time is diminishing democracy; no American should remain quiet — or allow Republicans to remain quiet and in the background in politburo-like assent — as Trump makes his administration as destructive to the infrastructure of America as he has allowed COVID-19 to be to the lives and future of Americans.