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Trump is undermining post office to increase his reelection chances (opinion)

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He started by admitting on TV that he desires to block emergency funding for the US Postal Service and state election authorities as a result of he fears voting by mail would threaten his reelection.

Then, he all however demanded his legal professional common produce politically motivated indictments earlier than the presidential election to assist his baseless conspiracy principle in regards to the origins of the Russia probe.

And at day’s finish, the Birther-in-Chief stood at a White Home lectern and slimily revived certainly one of his well-known canards, questioning whether or not Sen. Kamala Harris, the proud daughter of immigrants and born in Oakland, California, meets the constitutional requirements to be Vice President. (There is no query she does.)

One other 1,500 People had died solely the day earlier than of Covid-19, the illness President Donald Trump has assured us is going away. Wednesday’s toll alone eclipsed all of the Covid deaths to date in Japan, a rustic that on Monday the President falsely insinuated was doing far worse than the US.

It is Covid-19, after all, that has prompted many People to need to vote by mail slightly than threat their well being and their lives in crowded polling locations. Native election authorities are reporting issue even recruiting ballot staff and election judges to run the precincts in November.

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This is why congressional Democrats are insisting on emergency support to the beleaguered Postal Service and to state and native election businesses that anticipate to be flooded with mail-in ballots. Their well-founded worry is that with the mail slowed, ballots will not arrive in time to be counted, and hundreds of thousands of People shall be disenfranchised.

That concern compounded Friday when, the Postal Service knowledgeable many states that they could not guarantee the timely delivery of ballots this fall.
Polls present that because the President began attacking mail-in voting, Republicans have begun to shy away from it.
The disproportionate share of voters who say they plan to vote by mail are Democrats. Issues with the supply or counting of mail-in ballots would fall extra closely on Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, than the President. A Wisconsin poll final week confirmed that 81% of those that mentioned they’d vote by mail would vote for Biden. Simply 14% mentioned they’d vote for Trump.

For months, the President has been loudly proclaiming, with out proof, that widespread mail-in voting would lead to “huge fraud.”

It is a acquainted rant.

In 2016, Trump dismissed his 3 million popular-vote loss to Hillary Clinton with related nonsense. A presidential panel he commissioned to examine discovered no proof to assist such assertions.

Now Trump, trailing within the polls, is pre-spinning the election outcomes, establishing what might be a winter of litigation and turmoil centered across the counting of mail-in ballots. However state election authorities and nonpartisan consultants have been clear: The chance of mail-in voting, which has been practiced in America because the Civil Conflict, is not fraud. The chance is whether or not the embattled US Postal Service can ship ballots on time.

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And right here, Trump appears decided to muck up the works.

A couple of months in the past, the President put in certainly one of his million-dollar donors, Louis DeJoy, as the brand new Postmaster Basic, and DeJoy has chosen this moment to make deep cuts, finish time beyond regulation pay and fireplace 23 skilled prime managers on the Postal Service lower than 100 days earlier than the election.

The Postal Service has lengthy struggled financially due to the arrival of electronic mail and stiff competitors from delivery firms. However the timing of those adjustments and the ensuing slowdown in mail supply have raised suspicions that it was supposed all alongside.

In an interview with Fox News Business on Thursday, the President eliminated all thriller: “Now they want that cash so as to make the post office work so it may take all of those hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of ballots … But when they do not get these two gadgets (support to the Postal Service and election help for the states) meaning you possibly can’t have common mail-in voting…”

Usually, a president would see it as his duty throughout a pandemic to do the whole lot inside his energy to be sure that each eligible voter who desires to solid a poll can achieve this safely

Not this President.

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When CNN’s Kaitlan Collins requested him Thursday about voters who really feel unsafe about voting in particular person, Trump brushed their issues apart. “Effectively, they are going to have to really feel protected, and they are going to be protected, and we’ll make it possible for they’re protected,” he mentioned.

Congressional leaders are urgent for a compromise with the White Home on a stimulus plan that may enable for support to the Postal Service and state and native election items. As an alternative, Trump is actually undermining the Postal Service to bolster his reelection chances.

If President Trump had been half as fervent about subduing Covid-19 as he is about stopping the mail-in voting that the virus has made extra mandatory, America could be in a much better place at present.

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