An approaching full week in the spotlight is not enough to satiate President Trump’s attention appetite.

There must be countless examples of this. Here’s a report from a local CBS affiliate in Houston about an 82 year man who’s gone a week without his heart medication because the package containing his medication has been sitting in a Houston mail processing facility for 10 days.

According to the report the man actually went without the medication altogether for one week before his daughter got a supply at a local pharmacy. The package with the medication is now more than 10 days late.

On the eve of the Democratic convention, a Danish newspaper asked me whether I thought the “emerging Democratic majority,” which Ruy Teixeira and I wrote about, was still intact. Here is a revised version of what I wrote them.

In 2001, Ruy and I did predict that by the decade’s end, there would be a Democratic majority, although not on the scale of the New Deal majority. We felt vindicated by the 2006 and 2008 Democratic results, which more or less followed our script of a majority based on professionals, women, minorities, and about 40 percent of the white working class. The one thing we didn’t anticipate was the support of young people as a distinct group for the Democrats, which has carried over. Read More

President Trump’s attack on the United States Postal Service is one of the most brazen and frontal attacks on the government of the United States in living memory. It could not be more serious. With the immediate threat posed by Trump’s effort to sabotage the November election every conceivable effort and available power should be used to reverse or ameliorate his actions. But while Democrats should be making every effort to combat Trump’s attack on the state they should also be making equally great efforts to make him pay for his corrupt conduct at the ballot box.

Read More

The news surrounding the USPS last week was grim. Out of all of President Trump’s rhetorical bellyaching about the 2020 election, this thread appears like it could have tangible ramifications.

I’m still wading through your emails about postal delivery in your regions and zip codes. It’s remarkable to me how widespread the disruptions are. Postal routes only being delivered to certain days a week, letters or small packages that would normally take 2-4 days taking two weeks and longer. I know that letters and parcels are lost all or delayed all the time out of the tens of billions of items of USPS handles every year. There’s a whole system for reporting and tracking them down. But for each of us individually I feel like it’s actually pretty uncommon. Significant delays now appear to be quite common, as we’ve seen in the news coverage.

Please keep your updates coming. Remember, please include your zip code. We should take advantage of the preexisting districtization of the whole country in numerical codes. One more thing, news reports in local media are just as helpful. We’re all seeing the same national AP stories and stories in the national media. But reports in local media are even more important for us. So please send us what you’re seeing.

Are you seeing anything odd in the delivery of mail, quality of service or timeliness of delivery? Are access points to the mail being limited? TPM Reader DG just told me that in South Los Angeles he still hasn’t received his mail at 8:30 PM this evening.

So what are you seeing? If you have anything to report, just shoot us an email at our main TPM email address which you can find in the pull-down menu at the upper left of the site. Here’s the key: Definitely tell us where you live. But the most important thing is to tell us your zip code. That will be a great help in aligning and making sense of the reports we receive.

Seriously, see something? Let us know.

I’ve written at various points about my dark view of most police unions in the country. Much of that dark view has been shaped by Pat Lynch, the head of the main NYPD police union. Lynch is almost a caricature of the municipal police union chief: intemperate, often contemptuous to civilian control, drenched in grievance. Yesterday, Lynch went to President Trump’s Bedminster resort where the President is spending the weekend and delivered the union’s endorsement for Trump, apparently the first time in living memory the union has endorsed for President.

Like any good manipulator, President Trump has been signaling for weeks that he plans to be very mad about the election. The preemptive complaints about mail-in voting, the race-baiting, the showy displays meant to signal law-and-order — he’s building a sturdy base narrative to stand on when things don’t go his way in November.

For anyone watching from a distance, this sabotage of the US Postal Service thing is for real. There’s really no question. We know this to be true from too many different directions, not the least of which is the President telling us it’s true. Some of the changes are things corporate lobbyist friends have likely wanted to do for ages – a different vision of managerial efficiency, sloughing off non-economic services. But even when that is taken into account these changes are being done in a way that – at a minimum – maximizes near-term disruption.

If that weren’t enough we are clearly seeing widespread delays in many parts of the country. If causing delays is not the goal then, given the impending election, you’d think there would be some course correction. But that’s not happening. It’s full speed ahead. There’s no course correction or adjustment because nothing is going wrong. This is the plan.