Candidate Donald Trump four years ago told Republican convention delegates and the world, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” But the inveterate con man always “projects his own sins and crimes onto others,” writes his former personal attorney Michael Cohen. Trump meant “fix” the criminal sense. It is what he is trying to do to the fall election right before our eyes.
The acting president began his administration by trying to fix reporting on the size of his inauguration crowd. Now he is trying to fix the U.S. Postal Service so it cannot serve the public during an election in a pandemic. Naturally, he was lying when he said “I alone.” Like Special Guest Villains on TV’s “Batman,” he surrounds himself with dopey henchmen. As president, he has almost a political party’s worth. Ron Brownstein wrote last week, Trump is “waging an unprecedented campaign to weaponize virtually every component of the federal government to partisan advantage” — the Postal Service, Census Bureau, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security and more. He has installed henchmen everywhere.
Donald Trump is a bad American and a worse president. Everything with him is a scam. He, even more then the party he leads, does not believe in public service. The Post Office he is trying to destroy was conceived from an egalitarian impulse as as a public service, a way to bind together “every far-flung, culturally disparate settlement within the early republic,” writes Eric Levitz:
At that time, Western European states ran their postal services as revenue-generating enterprises, and therefore denied mail delivery to communities that could not be served at a profit. America’s post office, by contrast, was conceived as a “service to the public and to national unification,” and thus provided mail to Americans in remote, rural areas as an entitlement. Over the ensuing centuries, the agency would become a vital source of middle-class employment — particularly for African-Americans and other marginalized groups locked out of remunerative roles in the private labor market — while remaining one of the few overwhelmingly popular public institutions in the United States.
The demographic headwinds Republicans face and the legal threats facing Trump upon leaving office have surfaced the party’s royalist underpinnings. Small-d democratic pretexts are falling away as Republicans express “open hostility toward popular sovereignty.” They are no longer trying to hide efforts to suppress the vote and preserve minority rule.
Donald Trump expresses the movement’s contempt for democracy in unusually forthright and vulgar terms. But Mitch McConnell has argued that “voting is a privilege” from the floor of the U.S. Senate, and Republicans in statehouses across the country have unabashedly endorsed the principle that the votes of Democratic regions should count for less than those of Republican ones. For all the American right’s populist affectations, none of its stratagems for targeted voter suppression induce much cognitive dissonance: The notion that the preservation of natural hierarchies (whether dictated by God or market forces) takes precedence over democracy is deeply rooted in the white Evangelical and libertarian intellectual traditions.
Trump’s henchmen, well-tailored and not, will leap to cover his backside and maintain a social order that is anything but egalitarian. It is why Black Lives Matter is threatening enough that they would deploy troops, tear gas, and agent provocateurs.
There are non-election-related reasons, Levitz suggests, for why Trump’s postmaster general would be undercutting the agency he was appointed to run. Royalists’ natural antipathy to any government service that subordinates profit to serving commoners and providing them upward mobility, for example.
But the goals of Trump and his henchmen are by now fundamentally at odds with the espoused goals of the original American project, however imperfectly conceived. We are in another revolutionary fight for freedom, this time to defeat the zombie return of rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry supported by willing if not gullible henchmen-subjects. Democrats had best treat it as such.
Levitz concludes:
At the time of its creation, the post office embodied the American republic’s progressive potential. It was a force of national unification and democratization that testified to the government’s capacity to expedite and guide economic development with an eye towards the citizenry’s collective benefit. But our settler-colonial society harbored other potentialities. And 244 years into the American experiment, the forces of reaction have brought us to a place where the U.S. Postal Service threatens to deliver democratic decline — if not disunion. In the days and weeks ahead, Democrats in Congress, and small-d democrats nationwide, must defend the USPS as if our democracy depends on it.
When George W. Bush ran for president, Molly Ivins warned readers not to let “Shrub” and his gang of vigilantes anywhere near Washington, D.C. He would do to the country what he did to Texas. Trump and his henchmen are doing to it what he did to his casinos in Atlantic City.
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