Donald Trump is considering suing the U.S. Postal Service in an apparent attempt to discredit mail-in voting results.
In an interview Monday night with Real America’s Voice host Wayne Allyn Root, Trump reverted back to his old complaints about mail-in voting, which he had previously heavily criticized as being rife with fraud before and after the 2020 election.
“We have very bad elections. We have a bad voting system. We have mail-in ballots. You know it’s very interesting, I read the other day, the post office is saying how bad it is,” Trump said.
“The post office is critiquing itself saying, ‘We’re really in bad shape, we can’t deliver the mail,’ and they’re not even talking about mail-in ballots, ‘Well we’re gonna dump millions and millions of ballots,’” Trump said. “And I’m saying to myself, ‘How can they be taking the vote?’”
“And I said you know we ought to go to court and we ought to bring a lawsuit, because they’re gonna lose hundreds of thousands of ballots. Maybe purpose-ly. Or maybe just through incompetence,” Trump continued.
“I think it was yesterday, the U.S. Postal Service union endorsed Kamala Harris,” Root pointed out.
“Now, you’ve got mail-in ballots being trusted into the hands of people that just endorsed Kamala Harris,” Root raved. “That union—how do you know this is gonna be a clean election?”
“Well they’ve always been a very Democrat union. That’s the way it is. We’ve got people who like us too,” Trump replied.
Trump’s plan to launch a lawsuit against the U.S. Postal Service comes just days after he cast doubt about the organization in a post on Truth Social.
“The United States Postal Service has admitted that it is a poorly run mess that is experiencing mail loss and delays at a level never seen before. With this being the FACT, how can we possibly be expected to allow or trust the U.S. Postal Service to run the 2024 Presidential Election? It is not possible for them to do so. HELP!” Trump wrote on Sunday.
(The postmaster general is Louis DeJoy, a Trump appointee.)
With these comments, Trump is once again setting the stage to challenge any election results that he doesn’t like.
Only a few months ago, the Republican party had begun taking extra steps to encourage mail-in voting, after having falsely claimed that it was responsible for Trump’s loss in 2020. Ahead of the 2020 general election, Trump had argued that mail balloting was unreliable, and encouraged his supporters to vote in-person in the middle of a global pandemic.
“In this election cycle, Republicans will beat Democrats at their own game, by leveraging every legal tactic at our disposal based on the rules of each state,” Lara Trump, the Republican National Committee co-chair, told the Associated Press in May. In July, she suggested that the former president had learned to embrace mail-in voting. Still, Trump continues to heavily (and falsely) criticize the tactic as being rife with fraud.
It’s not clear, in fact, that Trump was ever really on board with mail-in voting. In March, Lara Trump said that Trump planned to do away with mail-in voting entirely if elected president.
DeJoy wrote in a letter Monday that the U.S. Postal Service was well prepared to handle the election, including bolstering carrier training and working directly with election officials to deal with the incoming flood of mail-in ballots.
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