It’s bad enough for Trump to politicize a pandemic, and heartbreaking also to see him tarnish our most trusted and beloved institutions.

The postman’s bag has always been a symbol of life:

“Postman’s bag is always heavy because it carries the life itself: It carries all the sorrows and all the joys, all the worries and all the hopes!” wrote Mehmet Murat ildan.

Morally, the sneaky effort to dismantle the post office to help Trump’s re-election borders is a travesty and a violation of his vow to defend and protect the constitution.

Politically, it is insane, the construction of a broken mind, and a fractured sense of morality. Veterans are already reporting their medicines are a week or more later, and so are the Social Security checks of millions of older people.

It also shows us once more how broken Trump’s sense of duty and right and wrong are, and how little he understands about American and the very heartland that helped to elect him.

The geography of Trumpism is rural and Southern, those regions depend heavily on the postal service for their existence, remaining community,  and survival.

Trump’s attack on the post office is almost certain to backfire.

There is hardly anything he could do that would more disrupt the lives and well-being of many millions of people.

In many ways, it already has.

As the U.S.P.S. slows down, mail-in ballots won’t be the only collateral damage. Trump conceded to a Fox News interviewer last week that he is holding up funding of the Postal Service because “that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”

This might have worked as a secret, sneak attack.

But out in the open like this, it seems almost certain to fail.

Any single billionnaire could give every affected voter a first-class stamp, and there is time to raise Hell about it, even sue or come up with a response.

Beyond that, it will harm as many businesses and Republicans as Democrats. It’s just dumb.

The postal service is a unique institution; everyone has a personal relationship to it; everyone needs it or knows someone who does.

Trump has defied the odds in many ways.

But trampling on the oldest and most loved government institution in the country is not disruption, it is admitted sabotage of our electoral system. You can already hear the roar.

Trump fears mail-in voting in the time of the pandemic because it would make it easier for Blacks and minorities to vote. He is unpopular with both groups.

The new postmaster general is a Trump political loyalist who has removed or demoted 23 senior postal officials over the last three months, eliminated overtime and sorting machines, and begun the removal of tens of thousands of post office drop-off receptacles.

Postal workers say he is making it almost impossible for the service to handle an avalanche of mail-in voting ballots.

Without mail-in ballots, politicians from both parties believe many people will skip voting rather than risk the coronavirus still spreading through the country.

According to complaints and testimony from around the country, the post office, an agency as old as the U.S. government itself, and which employs 637,000 people, is visibly and struggling to do the job it has always done without fail.

According to Philip F. Rubio, the leading expert in the country on the U.S. Postal Service and a professor of history at North Carolina A&T State University, there are now “widespread mail slowdowns of all kinds of mail – first class, marketing mail, parcels. Even the Veteran’s Administration has complained that veterans are not getting their medications on time.”

Rubio told an interviewer that for the president to admit to deliberately trying to slow the mail process in order to curb mail-in voting is “stunning because it is political sabotage.”

It is stunning, and if it isn’t treasonous, perhaps it should be.

In May,  President Trump appointed Louis DeJoy, a North Carolina businessman and major donor to Trump’s political campaign, as the new postmaster general. DeJoy initiated a wave of major changes that are crippling the U.S.P.S.

In July, at DeJoy’s direction, U.S.P.S. began to eliminate overtime pay for postal workers, ordering them to instead end their shifts at a set time rather than when all the mail is delivered — leading to delivery delays.

In recent weeks, U.S.P.S. officials told state election officials that if they want to ensure a speedy delivery of absentee ballots, they’ll need to pay for them to be sent at a first-class rate, which is roughly three times as expensive as bulk rate typically used to mail ballots to voters.

This week, without any public explanation, the U.S.P.S. began removing mail-sorting machines from postal facilities throughout the country.

But this seems both short-sighted and self-destructive from a political perspective since immorality and deceit no longer seem to matter to many American voters.

There is a lot of evidence to underestimate the amount of sympathy Americans have for postal workers, as Richard Nixon learned in 1970 after he provoked a postal strike.

Americans identified with their letter carriers. A Gallup Poll showed that 61 percent approved of the strike of the post workers who were holding up their mail.

President Trump is betting that crippling the postal system will be more beneficial to him on Election Day than it is politically harmful.

I wouldn’t take that bet.

“To admit this out loud,” said Professor Rubio in an interview with Politico Magazine, “is stunning, because it is political sabotage: He’s using his power of the veto to interfere with the democratic process and keep mail-in balloting from being more successful. We need more, not less, help for the Postal Service to gear up for what’s expected to be a crush of mail-in ballots. And, of course, we already knew it was hypocritical, because he votes absentee, and there is essentially no difference between absentee and mail-in voting. All this does is confirm what many of us were already thinking was his major motivation in holding up funds for the Postal Service as part of the stimulus package.”

Members of Congress visiting their home districts this week report outrage throughout the country, especially in rural areas where dependence in the postal service is exceptionally high. This is also Trump Country.

I’ll stick my neck out once again – I’m doing okay so far- and say that this issue is exploding and is red hot and the political cost for him and his buddy Postmaster-General will be too high.

Don, a former postal service administrator, wrote me a long and beautiful message this morning about his love for the U.S.P.S.

“… I was most impressed with the people,” he wrote.” They really are that dedicated and cooperative. I worked with the downtown processing centers, and also the smaller-town offices within our region. I never had a hard time with anyone. (Can’t say that for private industry.) I really missed my time there. Trump won’t take this organization down. He’s too small.”

Those messages speak my mind and my heart. Trump is getting smaller by the day.

Once again, Trump is misreading the American people, about whom he seems to know nothing. Once again, he is digging a hole that deep enough for him to fall right into.

There is a lot of irony in all of Trump’s panicked flailing around, he’s like a fish out of water, flopping along the shoreline. Benjamin Franklin took the Postmaster General’s job to help unify a divided country.

I have a feeling we may see that happening again.

Once again, Trump will fail to destroy the American political culture with a hare-brained and doomed plot, as he has failed almost all of his life until 2016, his most significant failure of all, as it turns out.

“In this country, two things stand first in rank: your flag and your mail. You all know what honor you pay to your flag, but you should know, also, that your mail — just that ordinary postal card—is also important. But a postal card, or any form of mail, is not important, in that way, until you drop it through a slot in this building, and with a stamp on it, or into a mailbox outdoors. Up to that instant, it is but a common card, which anybody can pick up and carry off without committing a criminal act.

But as soon as it is in back of this partition, or in a mailbox, a magical transformation occurs, and anybody who now should willfully purloin it, or obstruct its trip in any way, will find prison doors awaiting him. What a frail thing ordinary mail is! A baby could rip it apart, but no adult is so foolish as to do it. That small stamp which you stick on it is, you might say, a postal official, going right along with it, having it always in his sight.”― Ernest Vincent Wright, Gadsby.