You might not have noticed because we are good at hiding it, but some of the TPM staff is a bit sleep deprived this week.

There are so many more important events unfolding before us and questions to be answered. But I wanted to share a few thoughts on aesthetics and communications. From the beginning of the pandemic, if you’re a TV watcher, you’ve been watching people interviewed in their homes. The hosts have mainly set up mini-studios so the fact that they’re recording from home is almost hidden. But with guests it’s all pretty clear. They’re in their den or at their computer. They may put some thought into the background. But basically it’s their home.

And really, it’s much better. Certainly it’s more congenial for the guests who don’t have to trek to studios and sit in green rooms for hours for six minutes on air (this is the main reason I seldom do TV). But it’s also better viewing. It’s more relaxed. You see the creature in its natural environment as opposed to through the homogenized medium of TV studios.

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

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.

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.