Trump’s Unfounded USPS Comments Lead to Wild Conspiracy Theorizing

W hen President Trump claimed in a Thursday interview with Maria Bartiromo that the Postal Service was “not equipped” to handle “universal mail-in voting,” the media seized on the tidbit as confirmation that Trump was hijacking the USPS ahead of the 2020 election.

Headlines in outlets ranging from the Associated Press, to Business Insider, to Slate warned that the president “admits” to blocking post-office funding to bolster his reelection chances. FactCheck.org issued a correction to a “baseless election conspiracy” it had previously covered. “Joe Biden’s June 23 remarks that President Donald Trump ‘wants to cut off money for the post office so they cannot deliver mail-in ballots’ have been confirmed — by the president himself,” the post explained.

But Trump’s comments amounted to his typical bluster and do not reflect the current state of play within the post office. While the USPS is still dealing with the financial difficulties that have plagued it for years, it does not need a cash infusion to handle the election. In its most recent fiscal quarter report, filed in June, the agency said it has “sufficient liquidity to continue operating through at least August 2021.” In July, it also reached an agreement with the U.S. Treasury for a $10 billion loan “should the need arise.”

By taking Trump’s words at face value, however, the media turned has sown distrust in the post office’s ability to ensure a free and fair election, despite multiple guarantees from post-office officials that the USPS has both the funding and the capacity necessary to handle the expected surge of mailed ballots in November.

USPS spokesman David Partenheimer told National Review in an email that “the Postal Service’s financial condition is not going to impact our ability to process and deliver election and political mail” — a statement he also made to FactCheck.org in June.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told the Postal Service Board of Governors earlier this month that the agency is “not slowing down election mail or any other mail” and has “ample capacity to deliver all election mail securely and on time.”

The day before Trump’s viral interview, USPS’s chief logistics officer David Williams and general counsel Thomas Marshall penned an op-ed in USA Today assuring the public that “the U.S. Postal Service is well prepared and has ample capacity to deliver America’s election mail for the upcoming general election in November” and explaining that the USPS estimates mailed ballots “will account for less than 2% of all mail volume from mid-September until Election Day.” Even if every single registered voter — approximately 158 million people — casts a vote by mail in November, the resulting mail would constitute a drop in the bucket for an organization that already delivers 471 million pieces of mail “on a typical day,” according to its 2019 report to Congress.

Nevertheless, the narrative that Trump’s refusal to provide additional funding to the USPS will imperil the election has only snowballed since his ill-advised comments.

“New Postmaster Hasn’t Yet Met Election Officials About Mail-In Ballot Concerns,” reads a story from NPR, without mentioning that the Postal Service distributed a “2020 Official Election Mail Kit” to 11,500 election officials in March, two months before DeJoy was even appointed.

When news broke that the USPS had warned 46 states in July their current deadlines for requesting ballots were too late and ballots submitted close to the deadline might “not be returned by mail in time to be counted under your laws,” Democrats such as Ayanna Pressley and Ed Markey claimed the effort was coordinated by DeJoy, even as the Post reported that the letter “[was] planned before the appointment of Louis DeJoy.”

Viral tweets of mailboxes being “locked” or apparently removed have turned out to be completely fake. And prominent Democrats have now demanded that the FBI investigate DeJoy over the reforms he has tried to implement to keep the USPS solvent, while hundreds of activists have staged in-person protests at his home to demand the Postal Service not hamper the remote vote in November.

What makes the whole situation more bizarre is that the media, as an institution, prides itself on debunking Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks; see any number of the fact-checks scrutinizing the president’s baseless claims about the coronavirus pandemic. But in the end, their hysteria may actually persuade voters not to mail in their ballots, ironically accomplishing Trump’s wishes along the way.