Is he just incredibly, moronically stupid? Or is he malevolently spreading lies to suit his dastardly political purposes again?
As stupid as Donald Trump may be, it takes a willfulness to ignore easily available facts that thwart your political message, so we’ll have to call his latest tweets about Amazon and the United States Postal Service deliberately false propaganda and add it to the multitude of mendacity that characterizes the Trump presidency.
While we are on the subject, it is reported that the U.S. Post Office will lose $1.50 on average for each package it delivers for Amazon. That amounts to Billions of Dollars. The Failing N.Y. Times reports that “the size of the company’s lobbying staff has ballooned,” and that…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 31, 2018
…does not include the Fake Washington Post, which is used as a “lobbyist” and should so REGISTER. If the P.O. “increased its parcel rates, Amazon’s shipping costs would rise by $2.6 Billion.” This Post Office scam must stop. Amazon must pay real costs (and taxes) now!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 31, 2018
For connoisseurs of Trump tweets, his opening line is a classic. We were actually not on the subject (or any other subject, for that matter), and his own last tweet was an unrelated video of him hypocritically sending happy Easter and Passover holiday wishes to the nation.
For the record, what has been reported is not that the USPS loses money on delivering packages for Amazon, but that the shipping of packages is the most profitable part of its business and that the Postal Service’s contract with Amazon guarantees a profit to the USPS.
To understand the real motivations for this tweet, the next section of the president’s statements give it away. He’s attacking Amazon because it’s owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, a credible, mainstream media publication that does an exemplary job of covering the truth about the many failings of the Trump administration.
With the administration mired in scandals and chaos and the Mueller investigation getting closer and closer to discovering what really happened behind the scenes between Russia and the Republican party that suddenly changed its platform when Trump was nominated as their presidential candidate, trying to impune the credibility of one the top investigative newspapers in the country is a time-tested authoritarian tactic that is Trump’s reflexive action when he’s feeling cornered.
If Amazon pulled all of its shipping business from the USPS and gave it to FedEx or UPS or expanded its own delivery services, the Postal Service would lose even more money than it already does.
With an administration that has an agenda of eliminating every public service that it can and replacing them with private alternatives that will further enrich our nation’s oligarchs, destroying the post office is added side benefit for Trump.
Make no mistake about it, however, this tweet is all about a proxy attack on a free press telling the public the truth that Trump doesn’t want them to hear.
