President Donald Trump is pushing back after receiving backlash for recent remarks he made regarding the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) and universal mail-in voting.
The president sparked a lot of criticism from top Democrats after he recently said that without funding for the Postal Service, Democrats “can’t have universal mail-in voting.”
Asked how he is “sabotaging” the Postal Service during Monday’s “Fox & Friends” phone call interview, Trump dismissed that he was at all.
“Yeah, well no, I’m just making it good,” he said, adding, “I jokingly say, but it’s true, I want to make the post office great again. OK?”
He continued, “We’re making it so it is going to be good.”
“We’re going to take care of our postal workers above all,” Trump added, according to the interview transcript. “We’re not firing people, but the way they ran that thing for many years. This isn’t a Trump thing.”
He then turned to his repeated criticism of universal mail-in voting:
“Now, what am I supposed to do? Let it continue to run badly? So if you fix it they say, ‘Oh, he’s tampering with the election. No, we’re not tampering. First of all, absentee ballots like in Florida, those are great things. You send for it, you ask for it, they send it to you, you send it back with your vote.
[…] Universal ballots where they drop millions of ballots into a community, into a state like New Jersey is doing now, it’s going to be a disaster.”
Listen to Trump’s comments below:
Trump on sabotaging the post office: “Yeah, well no, I’m just making it good … we’re making it so it’s gonna be good.” pic.twitter.com/2cFV7rdTxd
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 17, 2020
Trump has taken heat from Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, who recently said, “What we’ve never seen before is a president say, ‘I’m going to try to actively kneecap the Postal Service to encourage voting, and I will be explicit about the reason I’m doing it.'”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) also called on Trump to “immediately cease his assault on the Postal Service, make clear that he will allow the 2020 election to proceed without his sabotage tactics and enable the American people the same opportunity he and the First Lady requested this week to vote by absentee ballot.”
Additionally, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said on Monday, “This idea that Donald Trump is going to do everything he can to destroy the post office because he knows he is losing this election, this is fundamentally wrong.”
House Democrats requested Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testify in an “urgent hearing before the Committee on Oversight and Reform,” as IJR reported.
The committee chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) said, “The hearing will examine your sweeping operational and organizational changes at the Postal Service, which experts warn could degrade delivery standards, slow the mail, and potentially impair the rights of eligible Americans to cast their votes through the mail in the upcoming November elections.”
The hearing is expected to occur on August 24. This comes as the postmaster general announced changes to the USPS and a warning from the USPS that there may be a delay in mail-in ballots arriving on time for counting.
