This is How MAGA's Plan to Privatize USPS Will Enrich the Broligarchy and Screw the Rest of Us

Donald Trump is "looking at" privatizing USPS as a means of enriching his billionaire buddies at the expense of harming his base, gutting necessary services, and selling America to the highest bidder.

I’ve been thinking of dystopian fiction a lot lately.

It’s probably due to climate change, the rise of wealth disparity, the mainstreaming of fascist rhetoric, the celebration of vigilante violence, and the re-election of Donald Trump, who is a criminal vulgarian and aficionado of authoritarians. We often invoke Mike Judge’s great satirical comedy Idiocracy as an on-point pop cultural reference that can, tragically, now be viewed as a documentary.

After listening to Trump’s first press conference on Monday, I’d like to introduce another cultural reference point: The Postman, a novel turned movie in which Kevin Costner ambles across a post-apocalyptic American wasteland run by violent, belligerent tyrants and survives by pretending to be a postman after he stumbles on an old postman jacket and bag of mail. The movie, an epic bomb, nonetheless tells a somewhat inspiring story of how people’s belief in the postal service eventually restores their hope in the U.S. government that can be rebuilt as an entity that unites, connects, and helps the beleaguered American people.

Unfortunately, we can’t have nice things.

Donald Trump’s conference continued his Festivus rants, which will now be a daily feature and not just a holiday tradition. It was a mix of verbal diarrhea, grandiose lies, the airing of grievances, and attacks on his numerous critics and imagined enemies, including Iowa pollster Ann Selzer. One of his most troubling statements was his comment about “looking at” privatizing the USPS.

First, let’s do a quick history lesson. The United States Post Service was founded by the Second Continental Congress in 1775 as an independent agency of the executive branch. Unlike for-profit entities, such as FedEx and UPS, our postal service is required to send mail and parcels to remote areas of the United States and as such is a necessary service that millions of Americans rely upon to, quite literally, live. You can send communication via email and texts now, but you can’t digitally take your insulin and other life-saving medications.

People who live in rural communities often don’t have access to high-speed internet or other mail providers. As such, USPS is their “lifeline” to the rest of the world. People still receive physical checks and thousands of small businesses need USPS’s rates and universal service or else they’ll be forced to shut down. It’s a remarkable service that was never meant to be “for profit” and is so essential that it’s one of the few government agencies that is explicitly mentioned and authorized in our Constitution, the same document that Trump infamously said he’d “terminate” back in the day.

MAGA cites USPS’s net loss of $9.5 billion as a reason to consider privatizing this essential service, but without considering that includes paying the pensions of thousands of postal workers who were government employees. But, who cares about workers and pensions? Not billionaires who see it as another cookie jar to raid to fund their tax cuts. What better way to enrich his billionaire class of donors and buddies than to gut the USPS, privatize it, and ensure the rest of us, especially his base in poor, rural communities, gets screwed in the process?

Trump initially began this campaign - which is outlined in Project 2025 - by appointing Louis DeJoy, his donor, as postmaster general. DeJoy is a wealthy businessman who was the first postmaster general in our nation’s history to come from a board of a privately owned competitor to USPS. For perspective, Benjamin Franklin was this country’s first postmaster general. Republicans loathe DEI and Affirmative Action when it’s for the rest of us, but they’re all in for elevating mediocre, inexperienced, rich, white men who bend their knees to Trump. (After initially attacking mail-in ballots in 2020, now Republicans are hesitantly open to this voting method after they realized it can help them win elections.)

In addition to privatizing the USPS, Project 2025 also wants to privatize and politicize the Weather Service, which Americans rely upon for accurate, scientific evidence and warnings about crises, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and heat waves. Please remember Trump says climate change is a “hoax” created by China and in 2019 he infamously changed an official National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration map to include Alabama in Hurricane Dorian’s trajectory. Now imagine this important service manipulated and abused in the hands of billionaire cronies who will most likely charge us to receive “emergency alerts.”

What could go wrong?

Republicans also want to privatize our prison system and our education system and replace the latter with private Christian schools and charter schools which have been mostly disastrous in places like Michigan.

With Trump in power, everything, including our democracy, is for sale. It’s all quid pro quo, baby. The US is for sale to the highest bidder. The Oval Office is Trump and MAGA’s ATM. The broligarchy, led by billionaires Elon Musk and David Sacks, all have their hands in the cookie jar and will leave the rest of us, especially his base, with crumbs. As the head of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, another billionaire Reek, have already held “preliminary conversations about major changes” to USPS.

We make America great again by raising the prices of mail and packages and making the service unaffordable for Trump’s voters who are allegedly concerned about the prices of their eggs. Such drastic measures require the consent of Congress, which will now be controlled by a Republican majority. Will they step up, intervene, and stop this madness considering it will kill members of their base, or will they continue to bend the knee?

I’ll hold my breath.

These are the same fickle, spineless Reeks who are currently caving to the MAGA bully efforts to support Pete Hegseth as our Secretary of Defense and Kash Patel as the head of the FBI, two thoroughly unqualified, ethically compromised Luca Brasi’s of Trump’s growing mafia who will gravely injure our national security and use their positions to attack Trump’s “enemies from within.”

Maybe it’s time for Kevin Costner to dust off his old Postman costume and ride his horse from Yellowstone all across America.