We’re playing right into Donald Trump’s hands with this USPS Post Office thing
If you’ve followed Donald Trump closely, you’ve seen a consistent pattern. When he’s trying to pull off some corrupt or evil scheme, he and his underlings try to carry it out as quietly and secretly as possible, in the hope no one will notice. When Trump makes a loud or blatant threat, it’s nearly always an empty one, and he’s merely trying to scare us into focusing on that empty threat instead of what he’s quietly trying to pull off elsewhere.
This brings us to Donald Trump’s sudden assault on the Post Office. He’s put a corrupt loyalist Louis DeJoy in charge, and he’s quickly made a number of very blatant changes. DeJoy has reassigned a number of top Post Office executives, in a move that seemed designed to generate headlines. He’s also immediately slowed down delivery speeds, another move sure to draw attention. And in perhaps his most blatant move, the Post Office website’s mail tracking system was offline all weekend.
Let’s be as clear as possible here: these moves aren’t aimed at killing the Post Office. For better or worse, it’s a massive, impenetrable bureaucracy that isn’t going to fundamentally change just because some new guy comes in and makes some changes. Further, Trump knows that he can’t keep screwing with the Post Office for long. Public sentiment will end up being on the side of the Post Office, and Nancy Pelosi will use it to force Trump to back down, long before the election.
This doesn’t mean we can just sit back and trust that it’ll all work out. Democracy isn’t a spectator sport. By calling attention to Donald Trump’s Post Office antics, we’re giving House Democrats more leverage for forcing Trump to back down. But we’re not doing it in the correct way, and it’s cause for great concern.
Trump and DeJoy know they’ll have to back down from their Post Office sabotage fairly soon. They know there’s no chance they’ll still be able to pull this kind of stuff by Election Day. Based on the bombastic, dramatic, showy nature of their antics, it’s clear that they’re not actually trying to fundamentally harm the Post Office from within, so much as they’re trying to create the perception that the Post Office can’t be trusted. Even if these antics only go on for a few weeks, the perception can last far longer. That’s where it gets dangerous.
Resistance members keep telling anyone who will listen that Trump has sabotaged the Post Office to the point that mail-in voting can’t be trusted. When you say this kind of thing, what people out there are going to hear is that there’s no point in voting by mail because Trump has already rigged it and it won’t count. Some of those people are going to end up not voting at all, as a direct result of you telling them that Trump has succeeded in sabotaging vote-by-mail.
You will never, ever, ever convince the people in the middle to make the effort to vote Donald Trump out of office, by telling them that Trump is just going to magically rig the election in his favor anyway. In fact that kind of rhetoric only serves to cost Joe Biden votes.
There’s a world of difference between accurately pointing out that Trump is trying to do something awful, and inaccurately insisting that Trump has succeeded in doing something awful. The former can help win us the election. The latter can unwittingly cost us the election. The Post Office tracking website is back online today, because of course it is. Trump and DeJoy know they can’t leave it offline for long. They’re just trying to create the perception that the Post Office is dead, and mail-in voting isn’t worth the effort. The question is whether you’re going to help them push that narrative. The Post Office is alive and well, and we will save it. Don’t play into Trump’s hands by amplifying his message about the Post Office being dead.
