Donald Trump is openly trying to steal the presidential election.
He can’t win by the will of the people. That much is clear. With three months remaining, he is hopelessly behind in every national poll and in most of the vital swing states. His gross incompetence in handling the coronavirus pandemic has sealed his fate at the ballot box.
He can’t rely on the standard Republican suppression techniques. Purging voter rolls, limiting early voting and shutting down polling stations aren’t going to be enough to silence an electorate that is this fed up with Trump’s ineptitude.
The president needs to take it one step further, so his latest desperate gambit is to slow mail service.
It’s a two-step plan. First, Trump is discrediting mail-in voting, even though he and several other members of the administration vote by mail themselves. This week, the president made the ridiculous claim that absentee voting is fine, but mail-in voting is not. Absentee and mail-in voting are the same thing, much like Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are identical.
There is no evidence of fraud associated with mail-in voting, but that’s not what Trump is saying.
Trump’s second step is to grind the postal service down to a snail’s pace. The president has already installed one his major donors to be the new Postmaster General. That man, Louis DeJoy, is doing everything in his power to screw with the organization.
DeJoy has eliminated overtime, shut down sorting machines and forced letter carriers to leave excess mail in the office, so as to create a backlog. This could cause chaos come election day. Trump is trying to create a situation in which either voters don’t receive their ballots in time, or ballots don’t get to the registrar of voters in time.
Either way, it’s Trump’s way of sowing confusion so he can discredit a result that will go against him, because there is no chance the American people want another four years of this mayhem.
More than 155,000 Americans are dead, a number that is certain to continue rising exponentially through November. Our society as we know it has been destroyed, mostly as a result of the president’s failure in leadership.
The economy has been laid to waste. The GDP dropped 32.9 percent in the second quarter, millions are out of work, and Republicans have held up relief for down-on-their-luck Americans for more than two months, to the point where expanded unemployment benefits have now expired.
But Trump is desperate to win, perhaps because of his childish vanity, but more likely because he could face criminal charges if he doesn’t. Trump does not want to go to federal prison, that much is certain, and he can stave off that ignominious possibility if he stays in office another four years.
The statute of limitations on potential obstruction of justice charges related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election meddling in the 2016 election is five years. That means Trump could run out the clock if he is elected to a second term and serves it to the end.
That's to say nothing of other jurisdictions, namely in New York, that appear to be champing at the bit to get a piece of the president when he’s out of office.
Under this backdrop, Trump appears willing to do anything to stay in office, and that includes attempting to steal an election he can’t win legitimately. This week, he floated the idea of delaying the vote, which earned him a rare rebuke from his Republican enablers on Capitol Hill.
Now, he’s messing with our mail. Donald Trump does not seem to understand the extreme level of antipathy Americans have for him at the moment. The people are highly motivated to vote against him through whatever means available to them, so Trump can continue to lie, cheat and steal his way toward Nov. 3 and Jan. 20, 2021.
It won’t be enough to save him.