Donald Trump is an ignorant and vindictive man-child who hates Amazon because its CEO owns the Washington Post, an entirely separate business that sometimes reports things Trump doesn’t like. He’s also a big fan of privatizing government. In the Postal Service, he sees the chance to combine the two, and on Thursday night he put it in writing.
In the executive order, issued just before 9 p.m., Mr. Trump created a task force to examine the service’s “unsustainable financial path” and directed the new panel to “conduct a thorough evaluation of the operations and finances of the U.S.P.S.”
The president does not mention Amazon in the order, but it is clear that he intends for the panel to substantiate his repeated claim that the financial arrangement between the Postal Service and Amazon, its biggest shipper of packages, is a money loser. [...]
The order also calls for the task force to look at the service’s “universal service obligation,” which requires the service to deliver to everyone in the United States, given changes in technology and e-commerce.
Some parts of the order appear to hint at further privatization of the Postal Service, indicating that members of the task force should examine “the U.S.P.S. role in the U.S. economy and in rural areas, communities, and small towns.”
There’s a lot Trump could do if he wanted to strengthen the Postal Service. He could push for postal banking or for your local post office to be allowed to provide notary public services, hunting and fishing licenses, copy and fax services. Or to provide online bill-paying services. Or even just ship alcohol. There is so much that the post office could be doing to both strengthen its finances and be a better community resource if politicians—especially Republican ones—hadn’t gotten in its way and banned it from doing.
But instead, the Postal Service is being swept up in Trump’s own petty vendetta against Amazon, a vendetta that is, again, not about anything Amazon does. It’s corruption and personal temper tantrums top to bottom with this guy.
