SAYS IT ALL

 Bret Stephens: 

There was nothing small about the debate. Watching Trump was like being cornered by some oversize, overbearing drunk at a party who spills his beer on you while insisting that Lee Harvey Oswald is still alive. 

It was the single most despicable political performance by a sitting president in American history. Trump didn’t debate, because he doesn’t know how to debate: He interrupted, taunted, hectored, bragged and ultimately beclowned himself. 

The debate will be remembered for the contrast between this grotesque parody of a president and his dignified, well-comported, blessedly coherent challenger. 

Biden didn’t get to speak as much as he deserved, but when he did — most effectively by looking straight at the camera — he hit home.

After That Fiasco, Biden Should Refuse to Debate Trump Again

 

After That Fiasco, Biden Should Refuse to Debate Trump Again

The president was petulant and puerile, so what is the point?

 

By Frank Bruni

Opinion Columnist

·         Sept. 30, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET

I wasn’t in the crowd of people who believed Joe Biden shouldn’t deign to debate President Trump, but put me in the crowd that believes he shouldn’t debate him again. Not after Tuesday night’s horror show: a disgrace to the format, an insult to the country, a nearly pointless 90 minutes.

And, I should add, a degradation of the presidency itself, which Trump had degraded so thoroughly already. He put on a performance so contemptuous, so puerile, so dishonest and so across-the-board repellent that the moderator, Chris Wallace, morphed into some amalgam of elementary-school principal, child psychologist, traffic cop and roadkill.

No matter how Wallace pleaded with Trump or admonished him, he couldn’t make him behave. But then why should Wallace have an experience any different from that of Trump’s chiefs of staff, of all the other former administration officials who have fled for the hills, of the Republican lawmakers who just threw up their hands and threw away any scruples they had? Trump runs roughshod over everyone and everything, and on Tuesday night in Cleveland he ran roughshod over the idea that two presidential candidates presenting rival visions for America should do so with at least a small measure of dignity and an iota of decorum.

Almost from the start, he talked over Biden, taunting him, demeaning him, trying to provoke him. He interrupted him and interrupted him and then interrupted him some more, all the while complaining that he, Trump, ever the martyr, was being persecuted once again.

“Mr. President, I’m the moderator of this debate, and I would like you to let me ask my question,” Wallace said early on, trying in vain to contain one of Trump’s tantrums and wrestle him into submission. I’d seen debate moderators get perturbed. Wallace bordered on plangent.

“I guess I’m debating you, not him, but that’s OK,” Trump shot back. “I’m not surprised.” Of course not. To be Trump is to be accustomed to an unjust world unimpressed with your majesty.

He plumbed uncharted presidential-debate depths of nastiness. When Biden, objecting to Trump’s reported dismissal of people who serve in the military as “losers,” brought up his son Beau’s tour of duty in Iraq, Trump brought up the past cocaine use of Biden’s other son, Hunter. And looked impressed and delighted with himself for doing so.

When Trump was challenged on holding huge rallies where supporters pressed tight together, the coronavirus be damned, he said that Biden would do likewise if he could just get anyone to show up.

When Biden said that Trump needed to get “smarter” about the pandemic, Trump erupted, a Vesuvius of petulance and pettiness. “Did you use the word smart?” he asked. “Don’t ever use the word smart with me. Don’t ever use that word. Because you know what? There’s nothing smart about you, Joe.” His voice was so thick with unwarranted condescension that it made my skin crawl.

When Biden noted that under Trump’s watch, our country became the world leader in recorded deaths related to Covid-19, with more than 200,000 Americans gone, Trump’s retort was a claim so hyperbolic that I didn’t know whether to laugh at its inanity or cry over its insanity. He said that if Biden had been president, two million people would have died.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that Trump was breathtaking, and I may even be paying him something of a compliment, because it takes a peerless combination of audacity and mendacity to pull off some of what he pulled off.

On taxes, for example: He turned the revelation that he had paid only $750 in federal income taxes for each of two recent years into an indictment of Biden, as a former senator and vice president, for creating so many tax loopholes.

On federal judges: His boast of appointing scores and scores of them segued into a rebuke of President Barack Obama and Biden for leaving behind so many vacancies, as if they’d simply forgotten about them­. Not exactly. Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s Republican majority leader, blocked the Obama administration from filling many of them, and then, after Trump was inaugurated, abetted him.

On the integrity of the upcoming vote count: He pivoted from Wallace’s question about whether he would refrain from declaring victory “until the election has been independently certified” into a fresh exhortation that his supporters serve as poll watchers, looking out for sketchy activity. He’s going to get people hurt. I mean, on top of all the people he has hurt already.

Responding to this pile of bile, Biden was hardly a choir boy. “You’re the worst president America has ever had,” he said at one point. He repeatedly called Trump a liar and several times called him “this clown.”

“Will you shut up, man?” Biden said to him. “This is so unpresidential."

But Biden was right: Trump wouldn’t shut up, and wasn’t remotely presidential, and to the extent that Biden occasionally flung mud of his own, well, when you’re dragged into the pigsty, you have no other choice.

Mostly, though, Biden shook his head as Trump ranted and raged. He smiled dismissively. He looked at Wallace or at the camera or anywhere but at Trump, his lack of eye contact a suggestion that some nonsense — and some nonsense purveyors — are best ignored. His obvious strategy was to treat Trump as part spectacle, part joke, all embarrassment. Which is precisely how Trump deserved to be treated.

Who won and who lost? I know I’m supposed to make something of a determination along those lines, but that’s not how this debate went down. Trump talked more and faster and louder, which was clearly his strategy: Be so damned vivid that Biden would look even paler than usual.

In this Trump was successful. He had more fire — but dangerously, even dementedly, so. He never wore Biden down, but at moments he wore Biden out: Listening to Biden’s sentences peter out could be like hearing the air seep from a tire.

But here’s the deal, as Biden would say: Only one man on that stage persuasively communicated that he has the interests of the American people at heart. Only one man on that stage seemed at all interested in maintaining a tether to the truth. Only one man demonstrated any respect for Wallace or for the process. Only one man would be bearable for the next four years.

I needn’t spell out who that man is.

But I have a message for him, and I’m serious: Don’t do this again. You showed your willingness. You showed up. But another of these fiascos is beneath you. I’d add that it’s beneath America, if there’s even such a thing anymore.

 

 

Tom Friedman

 

Trump Sent a Warning. Let’s Take It Seriously.

Our democracy is in terrible danger — more than in 1861, more than after Pearl Harbor, more than during the Cuban missile crisis.

 

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

·         Sept. 29, 2020, 7:40 p.m. ET

President Trump has now made it unmistakably clear that there are only two choices before voters on Nov. 3 — and electing Joe Biden is not one of them.

The president has told us in innumerable ways that either he will be re-elected or he will delegitimize the vote by claiming that all mail-in ballots — a time-honored tradition that has ushered Republicans and Democrats into office and has been used by Trump himself — are invalid.

Trump’s motives could not be more transparent. If he does not win the Electoral College, he’ll muddy the results so that the outcome can be decided only by the Supreme Court or the House of Representatives (where each state delegation gets one vote). Trump has advantages in both right now, which he has boasted about for the past week.

I can’t say this any more clearly: Our democracy is in terrible danger — more danger than it has been since 1861, more danger than after Pearl Harbor, more danger than during the Cuban missile crisis and more danger than during Watergate.

I began my career as a foreign correspondent covering Lebanon’s second civil war, and it left a huge impact on me. I saw what happens in a country when everything becomes politics, when a critical mass of politicians put party before country, when responsible people, or seemingly responsible people, think that they can bend or break the rules — and go all the way — and that the system won’t break.

But when extremists go all the way, and moderates just go away, the system can break. And it will break. I saw it happen.

I would like to think that such a thing could not happen in America. I’d like to think that … but I am very, very worried.

I worry because Facebook and Twitter have become giant engines for destroying the two pillars of our democracy — truth and trust. Yes, these social networks have given voice to the voiceless. That is a good thing and it can really enhance transparency. But they have also become huge, unedited cesspools of conspiracy theories that are circulated and believed by a shocking — and growing — number of people.

These social networks are destroying our nation’s cognitive immunity — its ability to sort truth from falsehood.

Without shared facts on which to make decisions, there can be no solutions to our biggest challenges. And without a modicum of trust that both sides want to preserve and enhance the common good, it is impossible to accomplish anything big.

“Politics needs a reference point outside of politics,’’ argues the Hebrew University religious philosopher Moshe Halbertal. “It needs values, it needs facts and it needs leaders who respect that there is a sacred domain of decisions that will never be used to promote political gain, only the common good.’’

Public trust is eroded, added Halbertal, when people feel that this notion of the common good doesn’t exist because everything has become politics. That describes the United States today. The institutions we have relied upon to be outside the game of politics so as to adjudicate what is right and true — scientists, certain news media, the courts — have become so ensnared by politics that fewer and fewer of them are universally trusted to define and pursue the common good. Even mask-wearing has become partisan.

You cannot sustain a healthy democracy under such conditions.

And that is why the only choice in this election is Joe Biden. The Democrats are not blameless when it comes to playing politics, but there is no equivalence to the Republicans. The Democratic Party sorted through all the choices, and, led by older Black men and women in South Carolina, rejected the Democratic socialist candidate and said they wanted a moderate unifier named Joe Biden.

The Republicans — who in the past voted for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, sane conservatives who could be counted upon to uphold the common good — have done no such equivalent thing. They have fallen in line lock step behind a man who is the most dishonest, dangerous, meanspirited, divisive and corrupt person to ever occupy the Oval Office. And they know it. Four more years of Trump’s divide and rule will destroy our institutions and rip the country apart.

To me, the only hope for America is to elect Biden and split the G.O.P. between the Trumpists and whatever is left of the moderate Republicans, and then hope that a big center-left and small center-right can agree on enough things to propel the country forward, heal the divide and act together for the common good.

But for that to happen, Biden has to win. And that is why I have only one answer to every question now: Vote for Biden — do it by mail early if you must, but if you can, please, put on a mask and do it in person. If enough of us do that, Biden can win outright with the votes cast on Election Day, instead of waiting for all the mail-in ballots to be counted, thereby giving time for Trump and Fox News to muddy the outcome.

So help register someone to vote for Joe Biden. Phone bank for Joe Biden. Talk to your neighbor about Joe Biden. Volunteer for Joe Biden. Drive someone to the polls to vote for Joe Biden.

Do it as if your country’s democracy depends on it, because it does.

 

Donald Trump Barely Pays Any Taxes: Will Anyone Care?

 

Donald Trump Barely Pays Any Taxes: Will Anyone Care?

 

By David Remnick

September 28, 2020

Three enterprising reporters for the New York Times published a bombshell report Sunday evening on Donald Trump’s financial life, making it clear that the President of the United States is a desperate, cash-hungry grifter who paid no federal income taxes at all in ten of the fifteen years leading up to his run for office and has, in his frenzied quest to stay afloat, “propped up his sagging bottom line” by exploiting his office.

Readers learn that Trump, who inherited an immense fortune from his father, found countless ways to squander his capital. And, like his old man, he also found countless ways to short the government, including, according to the Times, paying his daughter Ivanka legally dubious consulting fees. At the same time, Trump has accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars in debt that he must soon repay. He is an almost comically inept businessman; he is the sum of his debt and bankruptcies. Nearly everything he touches turns to lead. Were it not for his investments in Trump Tower, “The Apprentice,” and little else—and were it not for the tireless ministrations of his accountants—he would likely be on his back. The question is: Will anyone care?

Readers inclined to think of Trump as a liar and threat to national well-being will doubtless relish every detail in the Times report, not least because it confirms, with documentary evidence, what so many have always suspected and what reporters such as Wayne Barrett and Tim O’Brien were writing decades ago: that Trump is a shady and conniving operator whose practices betray contempt for everyone from his contractors and employees to the federal government. The Times article is hardly the first to provide evidence of Trump’s grift, but its details are particularly numerous and galling. Moreover, it comes two days before Trump’s first debate with Joe Biden and five weeks before the election. Are there undecided voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Georgia, Wisconsin, and beyond who will come upon this new information and finally say to themselves, “This is too much. No more,” and not vote for Trump? It’s hard to know.

The President’s reaction to the story was entirely predictable: deny, deflect, and cast blame elsewhere. Accompanied by his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, he came to the White House press room shortly after the story dropped and attacked the Times (“Everything was wrong; they are so bad”) and the Internal Revenue Service. The Twitter storm saying that he was only playing by the rules of the game is sure to follow.

Trump has long been convinced, as he so memorably put it, four years ago, that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, O.K.?” And it is probably true, that for many of his supporters, his character—the dishonesty, the bigotry, the incompetence—is a given. It’s “baked in,” as the Washington cliché has it. No matter what Trump does, no matter what journalists go on revealing, he has, for the “base,” delivered on his promise to upend “the system” and inflame the élites. Some supporters believe that he has lowered their taxes (he hasn’t), defanged North Korea (he hasn’t), and ironed out the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (he hasn’t). For the Republican leadership, Trump remains tolerable because he appoints right-wing judges and cossets corporate interests.

A reader of the Times bombshell, then, can reasonably ask, how is this different from the last bombshell? How is it different from the memoirs by Mary Trump and Michael Cohen? From calling fallen U.S. soldiers “suckers” and “losers”? From all the generals, intelligence officers, and government officials telling Bob Woodward in “Rage” that Trump poses a threat to national security that is even more grave than anyone imagines? Four years ago, Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter for “The Art of the Deal,” told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.” This might have seemed overheated at the time—the result of a former collaborator’s guilty conscience—and yet, in Woodward’s new book, we read of Secretary of Defense James Mattis sleeping in his clothes at night for fear that he’ll have to race back to the office because the needless war of words between two erratic leaders, Trump and Kim Jong Un, might lead to an unspeakable conflagration.

The Times story does not make for breezy reading, particularly for a reader without a legal or accounting degree. This is hardly the fault of its authors. It is, by nature, a knotty unloading of many years of murky tax schemes, byzantine business deals, devious agreements with foreign partners, and complex legal maneuvers. And yet the reporters, Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig, and Mike McIntire, begin with a memorably simple paragraph:

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

The second paragraph is similarly terse: “He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years—largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.”

For years, Trump has advertised himself as a sui-generis brand of populist—the kind who somehow has golden bathroom fixtures, mansions, and private aircraft—and yet pretends to be the champion of the working and middle classes. Perhaps it is also “baked in” that many of his admirers enjoy his sense of spectacle and contradiction. It is hard to imagine, though, that every Trumpist—or, more important, every undecided voter in the swing states—will relish hearing that he paid, while in office, seven hundred and fifty dollars in federal income taxes. That is a stark number. How many teachers, nurses, grocery clerks, farmers, factory workers, bus drivers, truck drivers, and countless others will find that acceptable? How many will fail to compare it to their own tax bill?

Trump knows that he has certain factors on his side. As a demagogue, he is a master. He also operates in a modern information universe in which long, complex investigative articles are often ignored, distorted, or turned on their head. On Sunday night, while Anderson Cooper was talking with a panel on CNN about the details in the Times, Mark Levin, on Fox News, was interviewing Mike Pompeo about the many-splendored wonders of Trump’s foreign policy. The Fox News Web site responded to the Times article with the headline “Everything Was Wrong”—meaning, for millions of readers and viewers, that the news was not the evidence or the charge; the news was the dismissive reaction of the autocrat.

So who cares? How much do these near-daily bombshells change anything? The election is the only way to know. Trump, whose shamelessness knows no limits, seems intent on distorting that process as well.

David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. He is the author of “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.”

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When Trump attacks Biden at the debate, his scam will hit rock bottom

 

When Trump attacks Biden at the debate, his scam will hit rock bottom

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

September 29, 2020 at 9:47 a.m. CDT

President Trump successfully markets a fictional version of himself. For years he has reaped immense rewards from that effort. But then his hallmark combination of incompetence and narcissistic overconfidence leads him to squander those rewards on ill-conceived schemes. Yet he continues milking his fictional image by peddling a series of increasingly transparent scams.

 

That works for a time. But then the bill finally comes due.

 

That is the story told in the second installment of the New York Times’s deep dive into Trump’s tax records, which has just been released.

 

But this narrative arc also appears increasingly likely to end up defining the story of Trump’s first and second presidential campaigns — that is, the story arc of Trump’s presidency.

 

We are likely to see this vividly dramatized when Trump appears at the first presidential debate on Tuesday night.

 

Trump is expected to try to rattle Joe Biden by attacking his son Hunter, and some Trump aides expect him to reiterate his silly claim that Biden is taking performance-enhancing drugs, CNN reports.

 

Indeed, Trump has privately mused that this will be the moment when voters “finally realize Biden is just not there,” as one Trump adviser told The Post. Trump has even called on Biden to “agree to a Drug Test.”

 

It’s hard to see how this will help Trump. The new Post-ABC News poll finds Biden leading in Pennsylvania by 54 percent to 45 percent, which is driven by serious erosion in Trump’s support among non-college-educated White voters, and by Biden’s enormous advantage among college-educated Whites.

 

The Post poll also finds that 57 percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and they trust Biden more to handle it by 54 percent to 40 percent. Biden also has a lopsided advantage on the central issue in the campaign nationally, where Biden leads by seven points.

 

Trump will likely try to offset this by lying about his handling of the virus while casting Biden as weak on China, its origin country. But we already know from Trump’s ABC News town hall that he’s utterly incapable of answering basic questions about his handling of the pandemic, at least when he’s outside the Fox News bubble and is therefore not permitted to lie with abandon.

 

And why would voters Trump has lost over the virus be drawn back to him by half-cocked rants about Biden’s supposed dementia? Similarly, attacks over the fake Hunter Biden scandal, which has also crashed and burned, will either be white noise to swing voters or will likely further alienate them from Trump.

 

Yet attacks like the one over dementia have been a mainstay on Fox News for months, as Matt Gertz shows. Trump hears this echoed back to him on Fox and likely grows persuaded it’s fearsomely effective, that he can make things into potent attack lines simply through force of his withering reality-bending powers.

 

The parallels with the narrative arc outlined in the latest Times exposé are eerie.

 

Trump’s ‘fictional alter ego’

 

As the Times reports, Trump’s launch of “The Apprentice” in 2004 was only yet another example of him creating a “fictional alter ego” that extended him a “financial lifeline to reinvent himself yet again.”

 

Even as Trump claimed on that show that his “negotiating skills” had made his company “bigger” and “stronger” than ever, he privately recorded losses in his tax returns for the previous year of nearly $90 million.

 

Yet Mark Burnett, the producer of “The Apprentice,” helped Trump spin the “illusion” of a successful Trump benevolently unlocking the secrets of business success for the masses, the Times reports, offering this perfect summary:

 

Mr. Trump’s genius, it turned out, wasn’t running a company. It was making himself famous — Trump-scale famous — and monetizing that fame.

Trump’s “fictional alter ego” did hit the jackpot. But he then dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into ventures that slid deep into the red, the report details, such as golf courses and resorts. And he kept drawing money out of loans of uncertain origin — loans that are set to come due.

 

Yet Trump continued squeezing his image as a successful businessman for all he could. The Times recounts that this led him deeper into schemes that crossed over into “flogging things that could hurt people economically” and “actively capitalized” on “desperate” people’s “economic anxiety” amid the Great Recession.

This culminated in Trump paying out $25 million in 2016 to settle a class-action lawsuit over his Trump University, which was supposed to school people in his business secrets but was accused of “systematically defrauding economically marginalized people.”

 

The scam goes full circle

 

Now assign Stephen K. Bannon to the role of Burnett in the 2016 political marketing of another fictional Trump, whose economic prowess and outsider status would be employed to avenge “forgotten” working-class Whites sold out by financial and globalist elites.

 

In numerous ways, Bannon and Trump rapidly abandoned that promise in tandem, as journalist Joshua Green chronicles, leaving the original pitch largely gone from his case for reelection. Trump’s supposed managerial acumen has helped lead to more than 200,000 U.S. deaths from covid-19 and has earned him the distinction of being the first post-World War II president to preside over a net job loss.

 

It is perfect that two producers of “The Apprentice” also helped produce Trump’s convention, which peddled the immensely fraudulent claims that his stupendous, benevolent leadership largely vanquished coronavirus and that the biggest threat to the rule of law is organized, violent leftist terrorism.

 

At the debate, when Trump peddles his various lies about the virus and Biden with the same zeal that he made a couple million bucks by “selling hope in a vitamin bottle,” the scam will hit rock bottom. But the bill is coming due.

 

DeJoy and Trump lose a third time in federal court as Postal Service works to undo sabotage

 DeJoy and Trump lose a third time in federal 

court as Postal Service works to undo sabotage 

 

Joan McCarter 

Daily Kos Staff 

Monday September 28, 2020 · 10:23 AM CDT 

 

For the third time in a matter of weeks, a federal court has warned that the sabotage at the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) at the hands of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is politically motivated and aimed at crippling the USPS' work in helping secure a free and fair election. U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of Washington, D.C., ordered DeJoy to halt implementing the changes that have resulted in mail delivery delays nationwide. His is the third such ruling. A fourth case was heard last week in Pennsylvania. 

At this point, DeJoy is enjoined from continuing his "trucks on time" delivery restrictions that have upended the system, leaving mail behind for days and sometimes weeks and resulting in empty trucks leaving distribution centers when they couldn't be loaded according to schedule. He has been ordered to stop removing mail sorting machines and collection boxes now by three courts, and by all accounts has halted these operational changes. This is as clear a demonstration of why the independent courts are so vital to the nation as you're going to get, because every judge who has intervened has called out the blatant politicization of the institution by Trump and DeJoy. "It is clearly in the public interest to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, to ensure safe alternatives to in-person voting, and to require that the USPS comply with the law," Sullivan wrote. 

Monday, Sep 28, 2020 · 12:48:05 PM CDT · Joan McCarter 

Make it four out of four—Pennsylvania Judge Gerald McHugh joined his colleagues in stopping the USPS’s changes, writing “irreparable harm will result” in the election, and to the agency in general if they are not halted. 

That follows a ruling in New York last week in which a federal judge blasted DeJoy, Postal Service leadership, and Donald Trump. "They have not provided trusted assurance and comfort that citizens will be able to cast ballots with full confidence that their votes would be timely collected and counted," Judge Victor Marrero wrote. "The right to vote is too vital a value in our democracy to be left in a state of suspense in the minds of voters weeks before a presidential election, raising doubts as to whether their votes will ultimately be counted," Marrero said in his opinion. 

Judge Stanley Bastian in Washington State was even more pointed. DeJoy and Trump, he wrote, are "involved in a politically motivated attack on the efficiency of the Postal Service" and said "this attack on the Postal Service is likely to irreparably harm the states' ability to administer the 2020 general election." In his injunction, Bastian wrote "at the heart of DeJoy’s and the Postal Service’s actions is voter disenfranchisement," citing Trump's statements about withholding funds from the USPS and "the actual impact of the changes on primary elections that resulted in uncounted ballots." He continued that it appeared the changes were "an intentional effort on the part of the current administration to disrupt and challenge the legitimacy of upcoming local, state and federal elections." 

The various orders have stopped DeJoy from pushing his leave-mail-behind policy, from decommissioning machines, and required that he preapprove overtime and extra trips for the two weeks around the election as necessary to get all ballots delivered. Election mail also has to be prioritized as first-class. The Postal Service and 19 states are in settlement talks to resolve all the cases from Washington State, New York, and Pennsylvania. 

The judges in the Washington State and New York cases, and now in Washington, D.C., have handed down injunctions halting DeJoy from acting further. Judge Gerald A. McHugh Jr. of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania hasn't yet ruled on a separate case brought by Pennsylvania Attorney General Joshua Shapiro. This settlement will bind the USPS to an agreement and "act as a firewall against challenges from President Trump on the legitimacy of mail-in votes by recognizing the states' authority to preside over elections and how ballots are processed," sources involved in the negotiations told The Washington Post. 

As of Friday, the states and the Justice Department, which is representing the USPS, had agreed to most of the elements of the injunctions, including ending enforcement of DeJoy's transportation schedule and the decommissioning of machines. According to the Post, they had not agreed to an overtime policy as of Friday and were still discussing the issue. Sullivan's decision and injunction could help bring more weight to the state's side on this point as well. In filings from the USPS, however, before Sullivan's Sunday ruling, the Justice Department said that the agency had told managers not to reduce overtime, cut retail hours, close processing facilities, or remove equipment. 

The USPS has also said that it will treat all election mail as first-class priority whether or not it’s paid as first-class, and that it will make sure that any extra processes, delivery schedules, and collection trips necessary to get election mail in on time are allowed. There's a matter of oversight and enforcement to consider, but since their work is so public and has been under such scrutiny, it will be obvious if they're not fulfilling these obligations. Clearly, the courts are ready to do what's necessary to make the Postal Service operate.