Former President Barack Obama is speaking out about Donald Trump’s efforts to sabotage the post office so that as the president put it “you can’t have universal mail-in voting.” NBC News writes:
Obama, speaking on the podcast of his former campaign manager David Plouffe, was responding to recent comments by Trump, who said earlier this week that holding up emergency funds for the U.S. Postal Service would ensure that the post office would be unable to “take all of these millions and millions of ballots.”
Obama, responding to those remarks, accused Republicans of having tried for years “to discourage people’s votes from counting in all kinds of ways,” like voter identification laws and gerrymandering, but said Trump’s threats were “unique to modern history.”
Trump’s predecessor went on to say:
“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. 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.'”
“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?”
Listen to the full podcast here.
