 So, for months now Donald Trump has been ranting about the danger that mail-in voting poses to our democracy, because according to him, if we allow widespread mail-in voting, that will make our election susceptible to fraud and abuse. It doesn't matter to him that the facts don't match the rhetoric that he's using. It doesn't matter to him that the fraud rate for mail-in voting is literally less than 0%. To him, he knows that with how poorly he's polling against Joe Biden, the only way he's going to be able to win is if he suppresses enough votes. And that really is true for every single election. Republicans know that they are much more likely to do well if turnout is low, and so they try to suppress as many votes as they possibly can and cross their fingers and hope that that was enough. Now, with Donald Trump, he was really hoping that this pandemic would be a sort of natural vote suppressor, because if people are logical and they don't want to come out to vote in person and risk their own lives or expose others to this really deadly contagious virus, they just stay home, which is perfect for him. But during a pandemic, of course, mail-in voting is a logical solution to this problem. Now it's not just something that we need during a pandemic. I think that mail-in voting is one way to strengthen democracy and actually increase turnout. But to him, this is all about winning. It's all about him. Now, we know that he's going to continue to fear monger about mail-in voting. We know he's going to attempt to delegitimize mail-in voting. But the lengths that he's going to sound the alarm about mail-in voting and delegitimize it are now reaching new levels. Like we are talking about really scary territory to where if he could, I have no doubt in my mind he would be a dictator. Because he tweeted this out last week with universal mail-in voting, not absentee voting, which is good, 2020 will be the most inaccurate and fraudulent election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. May the election, until people can properly, securely and safely vote, think about what we just read. The sitting president of the United States just floated postponing an election because of some type of manufactured crisis he's trying to create. This is exactly what they do in authoritarian regimes. In fact, our country condemns other regimes with leaders who postpone elections. Not the day after Donald Trump made this tweet, his own administration condemned Hong Kong for postponing their legislative elections. So it's okay for him to float postponing an election because of some bogus reason, but when other countries do it, this would be enough for us to invade that country to bring democracy to them. Maybe the United States should invade itself because now we are very clearly entering dangerous territory here. And the good news is that Donald Trump doesn't actually have the legal authority to do that. But I mean it's still dangerous and so much so that this may have been a line that he crossed even with right wingers because most of the conservative subreddit was even against him. Not necessarily because they're worried that he would be a dictator, but because I mean just generally speaking, electorally speaking, this is a terrible strategy. It's making him look bad. It shows that he's worried. But I mean, this really is a new low. He genuinely would be a dictator if he were able to do that. That's what he wants. Protect his own reelection campaign at all costs, even if democracy is hurt by his actions. And ironically, he's claiming that mail-in voting is going to lead to democracy being illegitimate. But no, what he's doing currently is hurting democracy. Make no mistake about it. He's not worried that mail-in voting is going to hurt democracy. He's worried that mail-in voting is going to increase the fairness of this election and bolden and strengthen our democracy. And according to him, what's funny is that the people who are trying to offer mail-in voting as an alternative during a pandemic, they're the ones who are actually attacking democracy, ironically. He's making the case that if you are for mail-in voting, if you're giving people an extra option to vote, you're the one who's trying to hurt democracy. It's insane. So the state of Nevada, their democratically elected legislature, passed a law allowing their citizens to vote by mail. And his response is very telling, because he's threatening legal action against them. So RNC Chairwoman Ron McDaniel tweeted this out. Trump supporters are out in force today protesting Nevada Dems' attempts to ramp through mass mail-in voting and ballot harvesting. Republicans want to use the pandemic to destroy election integrity. That is projection right there. Trump then responded to that saying in an illegal late night coup, Nevada's clubhouse governor made it impossible for Republicans to win the state. Post office could never handle the traffic of mail-in votes without preparation, using COVID to steal the state. See you in court. This is like a true mask off moment for Donald Trump. First of all, he's inadvertently admitting that when more people come out to vote, Republicans lose elections. So who is it again that is worried about democracy? Now second of all, the language that he's using here after he floated the possibility of postponing the election is illegal late night coup. So you postponing the election over a manufactured crisis, that's not a coup attempt. But expanding people's ability to vote by mail, that is tantamount to a coup to Donald Trump. Unbelievable. Now what he said there at the end is truly telling. He says the post office could never handle the traffic of mail-in votes without preparation. Theoretically speaking, if you are genuinely worried about mail-in voting, what would you do as someone in a position of power? Ideally, you'd want to give them more resources, make sure they are capable of doing adequate delivery of mail during an election where we have a record number of people voting by mail. But instead, he's doing the opposite. Because if we're not going to buy into his lies about it leading to fraud, then the way he's going to stop mail-in voting is to just completely cripple the US Postal Service. And to do just that, to carry out this agenda, he put one of his friends who donated to his campaign in charge of the US Postal Service who's doing just that. So this headline from the New York Times, really it says it all. Mail delays fuel concern Trump's undercutting postal system ahead of voting. The President's long campaign against the Postal Service is intersecting with his assault on mail-in voting amid concerns that he has politicized oversight of the agency. By the article goes on to explain, President Trump's year-long assault on the Postal Service and his increasingly dire warnings about the dangers of voting by mail are colliding as the presidential campaign enters its final months. The result has been to generate new concerns about how he could influence an election conducted during a pandemic in which greater than ever numbers of voters will submit their ballots by mail. In recent weeks at the direction of a Trump campaign mega donor who was recently named the Postmaster General, the service has stopped paying mail carriers and clerks the overtime necessary to ensure that deliveries can be completed each day. That and other changes have led to reports of letters and packages being delayed by as many as several days. Voting rights groups say it is a recipe for disaster. Quote, we have an underfunded state and local election system and a deliberate slowdown in the Postal Service, said Wendy Fields, the executive director of the Democracy Initiative, a coalition of voting and civil rights groups. She said the president was deliberately orchestrating suppression and using the post office as a tool to do it. Kim Wyman, the Republican Secretary of State in Washington, one of five states where mail-in balloting is universal, said Wednesday on NPR's 1A program that election officials are very concerned if the post office is reducing service that we will be able to get ballots to people in time. So if he can't delegitimize mail-in voting because we won't believe his lie about it being fraudulent or leading to fraud, he's going to delegitimize mail-in voting by letting all of us know that if we are going to vote by mail or planning to vote by mail, that maybe our vote won't be counted in time or maybe our ballot won't get to us in time. This is outright sabotage of the election. If he knows that mail-in voting is going to be the main way that people are going to be casting their votes in the 2020 election and he's going to sabotage that system, which is going to make mail-in voting effective or a possibility at all, he's basically fixing the selection for himself. Because again, if he suppresses more votes, that's better for him. So let's look at how many people might want to vote by mail. In Kentucky, based on their June primary, mail-in ballots accounted for 85% of total votes. I repeat, the overwhelming majority of people in a red state like Kentucky voted by mail when it comes to the state of Vermont. Requests for mail-in ballots increased by 1,000% in Michigan. There's been 1.8 million requests for mail-in ballots compared to 500,000 requests in 2016. So think about this. If as many people as we're expecting want to vote by mail and they are not able to, this election might actually be illegitimate because of Donald Trump, this is outright sabotage and there should be consequences for this, legal consequences for this. Donald Trump should be sued. This is unacceptable. This should terrify every single person who cares about democracy. Donald Trump is a tyrant. He would be an outright autocrat, a dictator, a literal dictator if he could. But in wherever he's able to make a difference and kill democracy, that's what he's trying to do. And he's manufacturing this crisis and he's complaining that it is the people who advocate for mail-in voting who are truly trying to hurt democracy. This should scare everyone. And you have to be prepared during this election. If you get your ballot early, cast it immediately. Don't wait. Take precautions. Make sure you're tracking your ballot. If you have that ability in your state, understand that this isn't a normal election. This is the first election that we're all living through. We're voting during a pandemic. So take precautions and understand what's at stake here. Trump is quite literally trying to rig the election before our very eyes. And the sad thing is he might actually be successful and there might not be anything that we can do about it. We just have to sit back and watch in horror as this wannabe dictator tries to stack the deck in his favor because he knows he's gonna lose unless he suppresses the vote. This is nauseating.