If you have been paying attention to Trump’s latest attempts to steal the presidential election or waiting on a check to come in the mail, you’ve probably not been up on game. It’s OK, I got you.
Alright, so boom: Basically, Trump has been doing the thing he does when he’s trying to steal an election but wants to act like he’s not. First, he argued that expanding mail-in voting will lead to voter fraud. This is not true. It’s not even remotely true. Not even a little bit true and anyone who deals with mail and mail-in voting has come out and said this isn’t true. Detectives have said this isn’t true. Inspector Gadget has said this is bullshit. Luther (the Idris one, not Vandross) has said this isn’t true. Perry Mason (the old one not the HBO one) has said this isn’t a thing but Trump and his team have continued to push this foolishness to the forefront.
Then, Trump put a heavy Republican donor in charge of USPS as postmaster general. Seriously, he put some dude named Louis DeJoy—who is a major Louis DeAsshole with no experience in the mail delivery business, has never worked in the postal service and couldn’t tell you where a mailbox is because he has someone take his mail to the post office (#richpeopleshit)—in charge of the postal service. Oh, and he’s bringing in a salary of $291,650 to basically fuck the postal system up.
Since DeJoy took the job, he’s deployed some “cost-cutting measures” such as slashing overtime, which has been vital to ensuring mail is delivered on time. He told postal workers to leave mail at distribution centers if it delays carriers getting onto their routes, and has shut down or had mail sorters removed from postal service buildings. Carriers have been complaining that they’ve been given less mail to deliver and recently, photos were captured of postal workers removing those blue letter-collection boxes we see on every corner. (A USPS spokesman claims the agency will stop removing those boxes until after the election). He also recently reassigned or removed 23 postal executives in a recent leadership shakeup, which analysts say puts most of the USPS power in DeJoy’s hands. On Friday, USPS sent letters to 46 states warning that there was no guarantee that the postal service could deliver all mail-in ballots in time for the election.
For the TL;DR crowd, Trump claims the postal service can’t handle mail-in voting, then hires a major donor with no experience to fuck up the post office. And if you weren’t already confused, Trump then backtracked Monday on some of these claims, because of course, he did. In a recent interview with Fox & Friends, the president of people who have one toothbrush in a 6-person household claimed he’d be in favor of people who were afraid of voting in person because of the coronavirus. When asked if they could request an absentee ballot, Trump responded: “I totally support that. That’s a great thing.”
But isn’t that just mail-in voting? Well, yes. Trump’s big fear is that mass mail-in voting will lead to voter fraud, despite there being no evidence to support this. Most states require voters to ask for mail-in ballots to vote absentee (see, it’s the same thing!) and some have even expanded the reasons needed to vote by mail-in ballot—like a pandemic. Several states like Colorado and California are also doing universal vote-by-mail, where voters are automatically mailed ballots, which seems to be the type of ballot Trump is railing against, but honestly, who knows?
Oh, and if all of that isn’t enough to convince you that the president of people who wear tuxedo shirts to formal dinners is trying to steal the election, how about he admitted as much? He literally said that he’s withholding the funds the United States Postal Service desperately needs to function during a pandemic because he doesn’t want the money used for mail-in voting.
From CNN:
During an interview on Fox News, Trump said that if USPS does not receive the additional $25 billion funding request that Democrats included in the ongoing stimulus negotiations, then he believes the Post Office won’t be able to handle the influx of mail-in ballots in the upcoming election.
“They want three and a half billion dollars for something that’ll turn out to be fraudulent, that’s election money basically. They want three and a half billion dollars for the mail-in votes. Universal mail-in ballots. They want $25 billion, billion, for the Post Office. Now they need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said, repeating his false claims that mail-in voting would be “fraudulent.”
Why is all of this happening? Well, that’s easy. The president of the United States is trying to stay in power. Believing that he won’t win, he’s doing everything he can during a global pandemic (which is starting to feel more like a national pandemic) to steal the election. Republicans know that their people, the people who would rather walk into Piggly Wiggly with their butt-ass naked faces and fight those who tell them they can’t come in there like that, are willing to risk their lives to vote. In-person voting works out better for the president and his people. So Louis DeFuckHead has been singlehandedly fucking with the postal system as we know it so that he can help the president. They are all complicit, a whole lot of them.
Democrats, as late as they may be to the fight, are now working to try and stop the President and his merry band of thugs from stealing the election. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has called for the House to come back from vacation (yep, you read that right, with unemployment benefits all fucked up, no stimulus check in sight, no actual plan to reopening schools, and basically the world looking like it’s on fire, Congress was on a month-long vacation) to try and thwart the president’s plans.
From Politico:
The House is expected to vote as early as Saturday, Aug. 22, on a proposal to block the Trump administration’s plan for overhauling the Postal Service. This is weeks earlier than Pelosi and the House Democratic leaders had originally planned to return to Washington. But the revised House schedule comes amid a national uproar over a crisis within the Postal Service ahead of a national election that will see an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots.
But Pelosi and the Democratic half of Congress aren’t just trying to stop the Thanos of hatred and racism, some state attorney generals have also called for probes into how this bullshit went down.
From Forbes:
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong accused Trump of trying to hijack the November election in a tweet Friday and said he is “actively engaged in discussion with attorneys general across the nation to mount a vigorous defense of our postal service and the legitimacy of our election.”
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs asked the state’s Attorney General Mark Brnovich on Friday to investigate whether the recent changes to the USPS, combined with comments made by Trump about Postal Service funding, violate an Arizona law that makes it a crime to “knowingly delay the delivery of a ballot.”
Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.) made a criminal referral to New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal Friday, asking him to empanel a grand jury to investigate “subversion of election laws by Donald Trump, Louis DeJoy, and other Trump officials in their accelerating arson of the Post Office.”
On Friday New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy announced the state will largely vote by mail, and Pascrell argued that interference with voting by mail and state elections by the Trump administration may violate New Jersey state laws designed to protect the electoral process.
So now we wait for some voting by Democrats that the president and Louis DeFuckBoy will most likely ignore and prepare ourselves to mask up and stand in line to cast a ballot for president because Trump would rather run the risk of killing Americans than lose the White House.
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