Trump Blocking Postal Service in Hopes of Winning November Election

WASHINGTON, KOMPAS.com - The US President is not going down without a fight this November after a Fox Business Network interview revealed intentional plans of Trump blocking postal service to stop mail-in votes.

During the interview, President Donald Trump acknowledged that he is depriving the US Postal Service of money in order to make it more difficult to process an expected surge of mail-in ballots.

That matters to Trump because a successful mail-in voting system could cost him the US presidential election.

There are two funding provisions that Democrats are seeking in a coronavirus aid package that has stalled on Capitol Hill.

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Without the extra money, President Donald Trump said, the postal service will have insufficient resources to handle a flood of ballots from voters who are looking to avoid polling places due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money,” Trump told host Maria Bartiromo. “That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting; they just can’t have it.”

Trump's statements, including the false claim that Democrats are seeking universal mail-in voting, come as he is searching for a strategy to gain an advantage in his November matchup against Joe Biden.

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He's pairing the tough Postal Service stance in congressional negotiations with an increasingly robust mail-in-voting legal fight in states that could decide the election.

In Iowa, which Trump won handily in 2016 but is more competitive this year, his campaign joined a lawsuit Wednesday against two Democratic-leaning counties in an effort to invalidate tens of thousands of voters’ absentee ballot applications.

That followed legal maneuvers in battleground Pennsylvania, where the campaign hopes to force changes to how the state collects and counts mail-in ballots.

And in Nevada, Trump is challenging a law sending ballots to all active voters. His efforts could face limits.

The US Supreme Court on Thursday rebuffed Republicans who challenged an agreement in Rhode Island allowing residents to vote by mail through November’s general election without getting signatures from two witnesses or a notary.

For Democrats, Trump’s new remarks were a clear admission that the president is attempting to restrict voting rights.