How the Post Office Defeated Trump’s War on Institutions
In an era marked by malice and incompetence, efficient government is a radical act
There are a thousand ways the 2020 election could have turned into a generation-defining constitutional disaster. The president’s fallacious conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud aside, now is a great time to reflect on everything that went right with this year’s COVID-ravaged vote. The biggest winner? The United States Postal Service.
Despite a nearly yearlong effort by Trump and White House officials like Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to undermine confidence in the postal service — first by falsely claiming mail-in voting is dangerously insecure and then by directly attacking the Post Office’s ability to perform its mission — a record 65 million Americans cast ballots through the mail in 2020. Voters rejected sustained right-wing attacks on the integrity of mail-in voting to cast their ballots in record numbers.
The Post Office proved to be one of the few public entities resistant to Trump’s efforts to erode trust in our institutions. That’s important when you consider that the act of voting by mail, like doing anything by mail, is essentially an expression of trust in a small part of the American social contract. All across the country, in red states as well as blue, tens of millions of Americans folded their vote into an envelope and handed it to the Post Office on the promise it would arrive safely at the right election office.
And contrary to the Fox News/GOP Industrial Complex doomsaying, the ballots did arrive safely, in staggering numbers that dissolved Trump’s Midwestern advantage and punched a giant, fatal hole in the Red Wall by flipping Georgia for Joe Biden and the Democrats.
Trump didn’t make it easy. Those crucial ballots arrived before state-imposed deadlines only because individual postal employees took extraordinary steps to prevent Postmaster DeJoy and the Trump administration from sabotaging the Post Office’s ability to do its job.
Postal workers began warning Americans of dirty tricks as early as August, when they alerted the press to DeJoy’s removal of rapid mail sorting machines in key Democratic voting areas. That effort worked hand in hand with Trump’s public claims that he blocked USPS funding to prevent Democrats from gaining any political advantage from mail-in ballots.
“They need that money in order to make the post office work,” Trump told Fox Business in August. “If they don’t get those two [budget] items, that means you can’t have mail-in voting.”
When underfunding and undermining the Post Office didn’t go far enough, DeJoy stepped in to ensure as many mail-in ballots as possible arrived at election offices after state deadlines. Dejoy’s plan to limit late and extra mail deliveries was so transparently corrupt that federal District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered DeJoy to unfreeze America’s mail pipeline.
Meanwhile, the men and women who deliver the mail worked over, under and around the Trump administration to ensure ballots arrived. Even as the White House abandoned any pretense of good government as it tried to snarl the mail and hand Trump an electoral victory, postal carriers continued safeguarding and delivering ballots from Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and every other state.
A second round of blatant obstruction on and after election day earned DeJoy and Trump another scathing condemnation from Judge Sullivan — which DeJoy flatly ignored. But the Post Office is a vast and sprawling agency; its processes ingrained in the fabric of America. From the first days of Postmaster Benjamin Franklin’s tenure during the American Revolution until the COVID-19 pandemic froze American life, the Post Office has built a reputation as Americans’ favorite government agency.
In postal employees — nearly half a million across the country — DeJoy and Trump found a group of people unwilling to bend the rules and “show loyalty” to the president rather than the Constitution, Trumpism’s most debasing act of subjugation theater.
It may seem hyperbolic to say that the Post Office made it possible for America to successfully reject right-wing authoritarianism, but in the Trump era, an era defined by malice and incompetence, the effective functioning of a government agency is itself a radical act. That Trump was finally undone, in part, because ground-level public servants took seriously their oath of service is an especially gratifying close to America’s flirtation with kakistocracy.
Regular people dropped their ballots in the mailbox and trusted the Post Office to sort out the rest. That trust was once taken for granted. Now it is undermined daily by a cascade of disinformation from the most powerful man in the world. But despite what Trump may say, and despite attempted obstruction from flunkies like DeJoy, postal officers showed Americans that some institutions deserve our trust.
The same can never be said of anyone who took part in Trump’s indefensible attempts to destroy public confidence in a jewel of honest American government.
