On Thursday’s ReidOut, MSNBC host Joy Reid and former Obama official Dan Pfeiffer uncorked farcical doozies that have become routine for Reid’s show. This time, Reid insisted Donald Trump didn’t win the 2016 election fair and square (and thus is an illegitimate President) due to “foreign help and voter suppression.”
As for Pfeiffer, he dubbed Trump’s opposition to the U.S. Postal Service as “one of the greatest political scandals in American history.”
“In 2016, Donald Trump relied on foreign help and voter suppression to help him squeak by Hillary Clinton. This year, he’s literally going postal to do the same thing against Joe Biden. Donald Trump is actively working to ensure that your vote, the vote that you plan to cast in the presidential ballot, may not count in November,” Reid began, laying the groundwork for the left to refusal the 2020 election results if Trump prevails.
In a perfect world, one could look at what took place with Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks while maintaining that Trump won the election and Hillary Clinton lost. But that’s not how the world works.
“[H]e’s hell bent on sabotaging vote by mail, but don’t take my word for it. Trump admitted it himself this morning,” she added.
Later when Reid brought on Pfeiffer, she argued that not only will Trump’s refusal to throw money at the (dying and inept) Postal Service spell trouble for Americans voters, but he will keep people from receiving medicine and paychecks on time:
And he thinks the only other thing they do is deliver ballots, but we know in the real world they also deliver to rural people. They deliver to people who are not on the FedEx route. They deliver paychecks. They deliver people’s medicine. All of that is also being delayed and so I think it frustrates a lot of people that it doesn’t feel like anyone can stop this President from destroying the Post Office.
Pfeiffer replied Republicans must be shammed for “seniors and veterans from getting their prescriptions on time” and thus admitting that throwing billions at the Post Service has never been simply about making sure mail-in ballots are received by local and state election boards.
Imploring progressive “to raise holy hell,” he offered off the hot take that Trump merely opposing the USPS status quo “is one of the greatest political scandals in American history” with “the crime” being committed “right before us.”
The two continued to say the quiet part out loud with the funding dispute being not entirely about ensuring November’s election results are counted in a swift manner (click “expand”):
PFEIFFER: [A]nd we have to step up, and we have to raise holy hell.
REID: And I mean, you go to even who works for the Postal Service. I was reading a piece today, and we’re going to put up a little bit of it. Business Insider talked about the fact that military veterans form about 15 percent of the work staff, the staff of the Postal Service. 100,000 military veterans are employed by the agency, about 15 percent of its entire workforce, many of them people with disabilities. If there’s no overtime, that means military veterans who are disabled don’t get overtime. He’s not just cutting, like, maybe black and brown people who he thinks maybe won’t vote for him is overtime, he’s cutting all the military veteran’s overtime as well.
PFEIFFER: Yeah. I mean, it is absolutely morally and politically offensive what he is doing.
Going to commercial break, Reid lamented: “We’re trying not to be Russia. That’s the goal. Don’t be Russia. That’s the goal....And Trump is trying to get us there. He truly is.”
The ReidOut’s latest cockamamie conspiracy theories were made possible by advertisers such as Allstate, Febreze, and Infiniti. Follow the links to the MRC’s Conservatives Fight Back page.
To see the relevant MSNBC transcript from August 13, click “expand.”
MSNBC’s The ReidOut
August 13, 2020
7:00 p.m. EasternJOY REID: In 2016, Donald Trump relied on foreign help and voter suppression to help him squeak by Hillary Clinton. This year, he’s literally going postal to do the same thing against Joe Biden. Donald Trump is actively working to ensure that your vote, the vote that you plan to cast in the presidential ballot, may not count in November and he’s hell bent on sabotaging vote by mail, but don’t take my word for it. Trump admitted it himself this morning. He admitted that he knows the Postal Service needs money to process those ballots in time, and he is going to block that money.
MARIA BARTIROMO [on FBN’s Mornings with Maria]: What specifically are they pushing for that is causing this breakdown in any deals?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [on FBN’s Mornings with Maria]: They want $3.5 billion for something that will turn out to be fraudulent. That’s election money, basically. [SCREEN WIPE] They want $25 billion, billion, for the Post Office. Now, they need that money in order to have the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots.
REID: Okay. Let’s pause that for a second. Trump confessed that he is obstructing coronavirus relief and blocking money to the Postal Service because he doesn’t want millions of ballots to be counted on time and if that wasn’t clear enough, let’s listen to some more.
BARTIROMO [on FBN’s Mornings with Maria]: This is one of the sticking points that’s holding back stimulus for Americans during this coronavirus,
TRUMP [on FBN’s Mornings with Maria]: Oh, yeah. That’s one of them.
BARTIROMO [on FBN’s Mornings with Maria]: — the Democrats wanting for the Post Office for mail-in voting.
TRUMP: That’s — that’s one of — that’s one of them. That’s right. [SCREEN WIPE] They want $25 billion for the Post Office because the Post Office is going to have to go to town to get these ridiculous ballots in. [SCREEN WIPE] Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting.
REID: Trump is crippling the Post Office because he knows that Democrats are more likely to vote by mail this election cycle due to the coronavirus crisis and it’s not even the first time that he’s made that admission. He also fessed up during a similar debate over funding in March.
TRUMP [on FNC’s Fox & Friends, 03/30/20]: The things they had in there were crazy. They had things — levels of voting that if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.
REID: Hmm. And apparently to ensure success, in his drive to drown the Postal Service in order to save himself, in June, Trump installed a major campaign donor, Louis DeJoy, as his new postmaster general. DeJoy has been hard at work crippling the agency that he’s supposed to be leading. He’s already ousted 23 postal executives and moved to stop employees from working overtime, overtime that’s critically needed to get ballots and just regular mail sent out on time. Meanwhile, sorting machines are being removed from Post Offices, causing mail to pile up undelivered, and the agency may stop processing ballots as first-class mail, potentially causing more delays unless states pay a higher rate. It is quite frankly a twisted and broad effort by Trump and his team to suppress the vote by any means necessary. There’s the lying about voter fraud and promoting mail-in voting for only one state, Florida, because it has a great Republican governor and Trump lives there.
(....)
7:10 p.m. Eastern
REID: And, you know, Dan, I want to point out the last thing that you just heard the congressman say because Donald Trump is acting as if the only thing that the Post Office does is fail to obey him and gut Amazon, which he wanted them to do, which is one of the reasons he hates the Postal Service. And he thinks the only other thing they do is deliver ballots, but we know in the real world they also deliver to rural people. They deliver to people who are not on the FedEx route. They deliver paychecks. They deliver people’s medicine. All of that is also being delayed and so I think it frustrates a lot of people that it doesn’t feel like anyone can stop this President from destroying the Post Office through this Mr. DeJoy, who would then pick up all the profit on the back end and profit from what he’s doing. It’s frustrating for people.
DAN PFEIFFER: Right. That’s exactly right. Because like — Congressman Jeffries is correct, there are limits to what the House can do here, but they can be more aggressive than this and there is a very powerful political argument to be made. We can’t reason with Trump. He has a very specific goal in mind, which he’s trying to steal an election, so he can’t be reasoned with, but you can put political pressure on other members of the Republican Party because it is not just ballot suppression. They are preventing seniors and veterans from getting their prescriptions on time. And they have to go on offense there. It is great that the postmaster is general is coming, but he’s not coming for a month and we have to raise holy hell because this — this is — right before us is one of the greatest political scandals in American history. The President installed a political hack to delay the mail to ensure that votes will not be counted in an election that’s going to be conducted by mail, and the crime is in progress right before us and we have to step up, and we have to raise holy hell.
REID: And I mean, you go to even who works for the Postal Service. I was reading a piece today, and we’re going to put up a little bit of it. Business Insider talked about the fact that military veterans form about 15 percent of the work staff, the staff of the Postal Service. 100,000 military veterans are employed by the agency, about 15 percent of its entire workforce, many of them people with disabilities. If there’s no overtime, that means military veterans who are disabled don’t get overtime. He’s not just cutting, like, maybe black and brown people who he thinks maybe won’t vote for him is overtime, he’s cutting all the military veteran’s overtime as well.
PFEIFFER: Yeah. I mean, it is absolutely morally and politically offensive what he is doing.
(....)
7:14 p.m. Eastern
REID: We’re trying not to be Russia. That’s the goal. Don’t be Russia. That’s the goal.
PFEIFFER: That’s right.
REID: Dan Pfeiffer, thank you very much. And Trump is trying to get us there. He truly is.
