A single 2016 election-results lie led to Trump’s hatred of the USPS. “Allies coddled Trump by telling him the reason he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 was widespread mail-in balloting fraud ”.
As is so often the case with this aging man-child, he is not one to let facts alter his paranoid conspiracy theories once they have taken root in his compost pile of a brain.
That one lie gave rise both to Trump’s fantasy about millions of fraudulent votes in the 2016 election (for which there has been no evidence despite a thorough investigation), and his USPS hatred now playing out in the daily news as we prepare to vote in a time of Covid.
Now we know. According to a just-released Washington Post story, although Trump had considered the USPS to be a “loser”, it was not until his allies’ lies that his disfavor reached fever pitch.
As he pondered his allies’ coddling false allegation his malignant rage metastasized, spreading to include his animosity against Jeff Bezos — a presidential foe in part because he owns The Washington Post — “deciding that he [Besos] was “getting rich” because Amazon had been “ripping off” the Postal Service with a “sweetheart deal” to ship millions of its packages, one [of his senior White House advisers] recalled. They explained that this was not true and that the Postal Service actually benefited from Amazon’s business,”
Never one to let the facts get in the way of a self-serving conspiracy theory, choosing instead to believe that he had in fact won the popular vote were it not for the millions of fraudulent mail-in ballots, despite his own hand-picked commission’s investigation-based rejection of that claim as being wholly unsubstantiated, we now see the astonishing spectacle as he now carries forward every day his groundless campaign against the Post Office.
“Trump’s fury with the Postal Service and mail-in balloting has become something of an obsession in recent weeks. The president devotes extensive time to reading news reports and other materials about mail-in ballots, talking about the topic with his advisers and thinking about how to block such voting, according to one senior administration official.”
This specter of a President so obsessed as to be wholly incapable of accepting any inconvenient facts should scare us all. Such an extreme mental aberration in any normal time should quickly lead to an intervention via Article 26 or impeachment. However, with Mitch still in control of his Senate majority, the Constitutional “safeguards” are powerless. The only thing that might save our nation from four more years of his ever-accelerating insanity is a massive vote in favor of the Democratic ticket.
I suppose a twelve-member swing in the Senate could do the job — Since the new Senate takes office immediately after the New Year, I suppose they could impeach him even before Inauguration Day. But such an action likely would create a firestorm without precedent in our nation’s history.