Former President Barack Obamacriticized President Donald Trump‘s attempts to defund the United States Postal Service (USPS) in a podcast with David Plouffe released Friday, resenting Trump’s intentional move to hinder the mail-in-voting amid the nationwide coronavirus outbreak.
“What we’ve seen in a way that is unique to modern political history is a president who is explicit in trying to discourage people from voting,” Obama said.
“What we’ve never seen before is a president say, ‘I’m going to try to actively kneecap the Postal Service to encourage voting, and I will be explicit about the reason I’m doing it.'”
Earlier this week, Trump told Fox Business that he wants to defund the USPS to discourage it from properly handling mail-in ballots in the November election.
“They want three and a half-billion dollars for something that’ll turn out to be fraudulent, that’s election money basically. They want three and a half-billion dollars for the mail-in votes. Universal mail-in ballots. They want $25 billion, billion, for the Post Office. Now they need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”
During the podcast, Obama used some strong words to denounce Trump.
“You now have the president throwing in this additional monkey wrench trying to starve the postal service,” Obama said. “My question is, what are Republicans doing where you are so scared of people voting that you are now willing to undermine what is part of the basic infrastructure of American life?”
