President Donald Trump is reportedly exploring the privatization of the U.S. Postal Service, a move that critics warn could be disastrous for the country, particularly rural communities.
Donald Trump has never liked the U.S. Postal Service. Even by Trump’s standards, his explanations for this hatred range wildly: He complained about the Postal Service’s contracts with Amazon (and its founder, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos), its imaginary role in imaginary mail-in voter fraud and even just the Postal Service being “a loser.” His first term featured frequent griping, efforts to undermine its work and threats to its funding.
Now, as he prepares to begin his second term, Trump is thinking about privatizing the post office altogether. If that happened, it would be a disaster for the country. And it would hit rural voters — who overwhelmingly supported Trump in all three of his elections — harder than anyone. On Saturday, The Washington Post reported that Trump was holding talks with advisers at Mar-a-Lago to discuss postal privatization. Asked about it at a Monday news conference, Trump called privatization “not the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” adding, “It’s an idea that a lot of people have talked about for a long time; we’re looking at it.” As Casey Mulligan, one of Trump's top economic advisers in his first term, told the Post, “We didn’t finish the job in the first term, but we should finish it now.” Admittedly, privatization may not be “the worst idea” Trump has ever heard — but only because that is a very low bar. In fact, privatization is a terrible idea in almost every way you could imagine. To start, the chief critique Republicans aim at the Postal Service — that it runs a deficit every year and therefore is failing — is completely misleading. The Postal Service is structured differently than most federal departments; it has more independence and funds itself to a large degree by charging for services. For this reason, Postal Service critics frequently complain that the agency is “losing money.” But the Postal Service is still a government department, like the Defense Department and Agriculture Departmen
DONALD TRUMP POSTAL SERVICE PRIVATIZATION ECONOMIC POLICY RURAL VOTERS
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