Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

Trump Only Hurts Himself With Postal Slowdown

Whatever the president’s motives, meddling with mail delivery is hardly a good campaign issue.

August 14, 2020 at 11:30 AM UTC

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

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I suppose I have to talk post office. But I’m going to leave to others the (fully justified) outrage about what certainly appears to be an attempt by President Donald Trump to improperly, and perhaps illegally, prevent absentee ballots from arriving in time. What I find astonishing is just how out of touch a president has to be to think that no one will be upset by an apparently deliberate slowdown in mail service. As the political scientist Ken Schultz put it: “Don't Republican Senators have constituents who depend on a functioning postal service?”