President Trump pushed back on Democrats’ claims he’s trying to “sabotage” the 2020 presidential election by “manipulating” the U.S. Postal Service, saying “it’s been run horribly” for years and “we’re going to make it good.”
“I’m just making it good,” Trump said during an exclusive interview on “Fox & Friends” on Monday.
“We have a very, very good business guy running it, and … I want to make the post office great again,” he added, acknowledging he said the comment “jokingly,” but “it’s true.”
Trump then said the post office lost $78 billion over a “very short” period of time.
“Over the last 10 to 12 years something like that,” Trump noted.
“And we’re making it so it is going to be good and we’re going to take care of our postal workers above all,” he went on to say. “We’re not firing people.”
“This isn’t a Trump thing,” he added. “This has been one of the disasters of the world, the way it’s been run. It’s been run horribly and we’re going to make it good.”
“What am I supposed to do? Let it continue to run badly? So if you fix it they say, ‘Oh, he’s tampering with the election,’” Trump continued. “No, we’re not tampering.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested members could be brought back from August recess to address issues regarding the U.S. Postal Service, while urging Democrats to appear at their local post offices amid the battle to protect mail-in ballots for the 2020 presidential election.
Pelosi, D-Calif., on Sunday said the post office has become “Election Central” due to the coronavirus pandemic even as President Trump and Republicans have warned for months that universal mail-in ballots would cause widespread voter fraud in the election.
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“Alarmingly, across the nation, we see the devastating effects of the president’s campaign to sabotage the election by manipulating the Postal Service to disenfranchise voters,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi went on to slam Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, calling him a “top Trump mega-donor” who has “proven a complicit crony as he continues to push forward sweeping new operational changes that degrade postal service, delay the mail, and – according to the Postal Service itself – threaten to deny the ability of eligible Americans to cast their votes through the mail in the upcoming elections in a timely fashion.”
On Monday Trump pointed out that “absentee ballots, like in Florida, those are great things.”
“You send for it, you ask for it, they send it to you, you send it back with your vote. Those are great things,” he said. “Universal ballots, where they drop millions of ballots into a community, into a state, like New Jersey is doing now, is going to be a disaster.”
Trump also said, “what’s going on” on in Nevada as it pertains to mail-in voting is “going to be a disaster” as well.
“No signature verification, you can bundle up, they call it a harvest,” Trump said. “I mean, harvesting is illegal in most places and they’re letting you harvest.”
The Trump campaign and the Republican state and national committees filed a lawsuit against Nevada earlier this month over expanded mail-in voting for the November election.
“Take a look at what happened in New York, disaster. Paterson, N.J., disaster. Virginia, disaster. It’s a disaster what’s going on,” Trump said. “They can’t count the ballots. They don’t know where the ballots are being sent.”
Trump and the Republican Party have been warning for months about possible fraud connected to mail-in voting. The RNC and the Trump campaign have filed lawsuits to hit back against efforts by Democrats to overhaul voting laws in response to the pandemic; this, while Democrats say that cases of actual voter fraud are limited and claim that Republicans are trying to suppress voter turnout to improve their chances of winning elections.
Earlier this week, the USPS warned 46 states and the District of Columbia that it cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail will arrive in time to be counted in the November election.
Democrats have asked for $25 billion, including $3.5 billion in election resources, to fortify the Postal Service in time for the election to be included in the fourth coronavirus stimulus package. Trump has said the Postal Service money won’t be coming through unless Democrats come to the negotiating table on coronavirus relief and give concessions to Republicans.
Host Steve Doocy asked Trump on Monday if he thinks “this just another way of trying to get that great big corona[virus] bill passed by the Democrats?”
“It’s a Nancy Pelosi con game with her associate [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer,” Trump said in response.
“The post office, there’s 25 billion sitting there, but they [Democrats] really want $1 trillion to bail out their badly run states, like New York state, which is horribly run,” Trump added.
He went on to say that Democrats primarily want to bail out New York, California and Illinois, as well as other states.
Trump noted that “the Republican states are doing phenomenally well.”
Trump added that what Pelosi “wants more than anything in the world is to get $1 trillion from all of the states, from the American taxpayer to bail out people that are doing a bad, bad job running these states that have been running badly for years.”
He stressed that Democrats “want to bail out Democratic-run states that have been running badly, but they want the whole nation to do it.”
“So instead of just accepting that, I fight for the nation and then they do the number, you know the phony number about the post office,” Trump said, adding that Republicans “want to make it run efficiently, run good.”
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“We want it to run for less money, much better, always taking care of our postal workers,” he continued.
Fox News’ Brooke Singman and Brie Stimson contributed to this report.
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