The post office just announced that they will not be carrying out the changes which they had declared just last week to be of utmost importance.
Why did they surrender so easily?
Trump appointed the Dejoy as director for the obvious reason of disrupting the election. And sure enough, Dejoy immediately -and proudly-announced that the U.S. mail could not promise to deliver absentee ballots in time for election day. Then they began dismantling machinery and mail drop-boxes.
Now today, they suddenly reversed themselves 180 degrees.
My question is : Why? What are they afraid of?
Pelosi called Congress back into emergency session specifically to pass a bill forcing the post office to not obey Trump’s whims.
But how much of a threat is that for Trump? The bill hasn’t been written yet, the congressmen haven’t returned to Washington yet.And a bill can always be stalled in committee, or by the Senate. Maybe not stalled indefinitely, but just a few weeks would be enough to let the post office do its dirty work.
But instead, Trump (and Dejoy) surrendered without a fight.
What’s the real reason?
As far as I can tell, they’re under attack from all sides on this–including from some other Republicans. So while I wouldn’t put some sort of trick past them, I also wouldn’t rule out that they think it actually backfired too much and would hurt them more than help them.
Alternatively, the plan is to do it again later, and hope that the fact it has been undone before would sew doubt. But I don’t think that would work.
This is Trump at the helm here, and Trump is utterly desperate. He’s trying everything.
It might well be last minute sabotage that seals the deal for them at this point. I suspect he’s installed the people who will arrange more ‘mistakes‘, misdirect ballots, cite conflicting protocols, sow confusion, etc.
It’s important Republicans ‘appear’ to push back against this now, so then can cite that action later.
Republicans’ interests in getting themselves reelected are certainly not fully aligned with Trump getting himself reelected. I think (I hope) that as we get closer without the numbers changing, and Republicans start to realize Trump is likely going to lose even with all the efforts to subvert the democratic process, that Republicans will start to push back against his most egregious acts, which in turn will have a feedback effect to make the outcome more secure.
I suspect that as Dejoy sees it, he’s there for ordinary conservative business-guy reasons of putting public funds in private hands and busting unions and then using those connections to elevate himself into an even higher plane of dealmaking and graft after he goes back into the private sector. To the extent that he’s there to engage in election-related mischief, I think that’s probably secondary (at least as he sees it) and not worth the cost to his own reputation (and thus later income) that comes from his face being on the evening news.
And the same calculus applies for Dejoy - if he believes Trump would probably lose even if he did everything Trump wanted, his best play is to signal privately to Trump that he’s doing it quietly, but then do nothing that might come back to hurt him.
The big risk here really is that the poll numbers get much closer, and it starts to look like some serious cheating could actually get Trump reelected. Then that potential payoff may be worth the risk for Dejoy and others.
My fear- there has not previously been much voter fraud, inclusive of by mail in ballots. But it wouldn’t be too hard for a foreign operation to attempt, even sloppily, but enough to throw doubt about the process. With the Ds having said it is so safe to rely on and Trump having questioned it.
I keep seeing that this. That they’ve reversed things or did a 180. However, DeJoy didn’t say he’d reverse anything. He said he was suspending some of the changes until after the election and, last I heard, the mail drop boxes and sorting machines that have been removed haven’t been replaced.
The funny thing, in my mind, is that a lot of Trumpers keep saying that the pandemic is a political hoax and it’ll go away after the election. Clearly, that’s not how viruses work. DeJoy said the changes aren’t political so he’ll hold off on them until after the election so just to prove it. Do we really think after the election he’ll finish ripping out sorting machines, stopping overtime and removing mailboxes? I don’t.
I think there have been several “built in” large mail sorting machines that were already removed. The type of things that will take a long time to reinstall. Now that they have been removed, DeJoy has done the damage he was going to do and can now pretend that he hasn’t done any harm by “reversing course.”
Right, as far as I can tell, he didn’t reverse course, but rather stopped where he was, with some amount of damage already done and not getting fixed.
With all the military vote-by-mailers and the rural package receivers, I’m pretty surprised Trump is fucking with the mail. I guess his supporters see his re-election as more important than receiving mail, packages, Christmas cards, etc.?
Also, if you fuck up mail-in ballots, you fuck it up for Republican voters, even those in blue states voting for their local Republican house member. On top of that, at least 538 says that mail-in ballots benefit/harm both parties equally, so this isn’t even providing a partisan advantage.
Exactly this. They did the damage, got some blowback and said they will suspend doing more damage. That’s enough for most Americans to tune it out until it’s too late.
It would be better if they undid some damage. They can say they’re not going to do any more destruction but I don’t trust them. Barr could have his Gestapo vandalize the whole infrastructure.
Yeah, my first impression upon hearing DeJoy had backed off was “talk is cheap.” I expect there will be continuing erosion in postal service, but with less public exposure.
I honestly don’t think that was ever even in question.
I think there’s likely plenty of them that are short sighted enough to be okay with getting rid of the USPS altogether if it meant 4 more years with Trump.
They’ll figure out later that using a privatized version of the post office means that mailing something across the country costs $15 instead of 55¢.