Since taking office, Trump has declared war on two enemies: Obama and America.
For years, the president has waged an all-out offensive attack on the former president, who doesn’t give a fuck about him. Obama is living proof that ignoring haters burns them way worse than engaging them. Obama has literally been living his best quarantined life and the president just can’t stop talking about him.
Trump hates America. He’s spent his entire presidency ruining the environment, denying climate change, pushing oil lines—hell, the New York Times has a running list of 100 environmental rules he’s reversed, including weakening restrictions on the amount of carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and cars and trucks.
Now Trump’s sights are firmly set on fucking up the U.S. Postal Service and nothing says that this is all going to go to shit like hiring a top Republican donor to run the Postal Service.
On Wednesday, the Postal Service’s board of governors announced that “Louis DeJoy, a North Carolina businessman who is currently in charge of fundraising for the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, will serve as the new postmaster general,” the Washington Post reports.
Trump has abandoned the normal presidential routine of hiring nonpartisan folks for appearances’ sake; at this point, he’s just hiring anyone who supports him and his wayward actions. Trump has declared war on the Postal Service and installing a heavy donor at the top of the postal food chain will surely make negotiations easier, especially considering “Trump’s Treasury Department and the Postal Service are in the midst of a negotiation over a $10 billion line of credit approved as part of coronavirus legislation in March,” the Post reports.
Trump doesn’t understand that, like the Armed Forces or trees, the Postal Service is part of the American fabric. He only sees them as a business and, in turn, is looking for them to become a profitable entity. Trump wants the Postal Service to dramatically increase fees for package deliveries for customers like Amazon, mostly because he hates its owner, real billionaire Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, a media company that has a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who stays on Trump’s neck.
“Louis DeJoy understands the critical public service role of the United States Postal Service, and the urgent need to strengthen it for future generations,” Robert M. Duncan, chairman of the board of governors, said in a statement, the Post notes.
“Postal workers are the heart and soul of this institution, and I will be honored to work alongside them and their unions,” DeJoy, who starts June 15, said in a statement.
Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, told the Post that this was a bone thrown to a big-time Trump donor.
“The Postal Service is in crisis and needs real leadership and someone with knowledge of the issues,” Connolly said. “This crony doesn’t cut it.”
Connolly is right. The Postal Service has long been an apolitical agency, but of course, Trump’s fucking with it by putting his homeboy with no experience at the helm. According to the Post, DeJoy will be the “first postmaster general in two decades who did not rise through the agency’s ranks. He would have to navigate a financially fraught agency while also working with its powerful labor unions, among the last public-sector unions left with significant clout in contract negotiations with the government.”
Partly due to the coronavirus pandemic and because it’s 2020 and Al Gore invented something called email, the Postal Service is looking at a $13 billion revenue shortfall by the end of September.
Trump has for years claimed that Amazon is getting over on the Postal Service because they negotiated low rates to deliver their packages. Real question: Does Amazon still ship through the Postal Service? All of my Amazon packages come from Amazon vans or Amazon fairies and Amazon storks.
Because Trump is a petty bitch who can’t stop picking fights, he literally tried to strong-arm the current postmaster Megan Brennan, who announced her retirement late last year, to increase fees for Amazon and other companies.
Trump has even warned that he won’t sign any coronavirus aid bill that has a $10 billion Postal Service loan, money the Postal Service needs to keep going, attached to it.
“The Postal Service is a joke,” Trump said last month in the Oval Office, the Post reports.
Trump wants the Postal Service to quadruple its shipping prices, a move that would price them out of the marketplace, according to the Post.
I’m just going to go on the record and say it, DeJoy is an idiot. How do I know this? Well, for starters he’s given more than $2 million to the Trump campaign or Republican causes since 2016, “including a $210,600 contribution to the Trump Victory Fund on Feb. 19. He has given more than $650,000 to the Trump Victory Fund and more than $1 million to the RNC,” the Post reports.
This has clusterfuck written all over it.