President Donald Trump has received a lot of criticism for the recent undercuts to the Postal Service from him and his ally who’s newly in charge there, and this weekend, high-profile music star Taylor Swift joined the fray calling out the president. She has made her anti-Trump political positions clear in the past, and this time, in a Twitter post that got about 180 thousand likes within a little more than an hour and a half, she insisted that Trump’s broadsides against the Postal Service make clear that he “is WELL AWARE that we do not want him as our president.” In an age of the Coronavirus, with increased levels of mail-in voting, the Postal Service is crucial to a free and fair election in which Americans get to make their voices heard.
Swift said:
‘Trump’s calculated dismantling of USPS proves one thing clearly: He is WELL AWARE that we do not want him as our president. He’s chosen to blatantly cheat and put millions of Americans’ lives at risk in an effort to hold on to power. Donald Trump’s ineffective leadership gravely worsened the crisis that we are in and he is now taking advantage of it to subvert and destroy our right to vote and vote safely. Request a ballot early. Vote early.’
Donald Trump’s ineffective leadership gravely worsened the crisis that we are in and he is now taking advantage of it to subvert and destroy our right to vote and vote safely. Request a ballot early. Vote early.
— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) August 15, 2020
Although Trump does not directly control policy at the Postal Service, its current Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, is definitely a political ally of the administration. Besides DeJoy’s big money donations to GOP causes, he even met with Trump at the White House earlier this month. The president’s team has claimed that the meeting was just meant to celebrate DeJoy’s appointment as Postmaster General by the Postal Service’s Board of Governors, but by early August, DeJoy had already been appointed for quite awhile — so what were he and the president’s team truly discussing?
Trump, on his own time, has indicated a readiness to hold up emergency funding that the Postal Service needs, explicitly pointing out how doing so could undercut the efficacy of mail-in ballots this November, although he did say that he might agree to the funding if Democrats, in turn, concede to the Trump administration’s own demands. Meanwhile, at the Postal Service, DeJoy has already implemented policy changes that have slowed down the mail, including the cancellation of overtime opportunities for large swathes of the workforce.
Check out Twitter’s response to the tweets from Swift below:
Featured Image: edited & via Eva Rinaldi on Flickr, available under a Creative Commons License
