Trump on USPS: “If they don’t raise the price, I’m not signing anything”
On Friday, President Trump said that if USPS didn’t quadruple its shipping prices it would block an emergency loan to help the organisation survive the impact of COVID-19.
Trump said: “The Postal Service is a joke because they’re handing out packages for Amazon and other internet companies, and every time they put out a package, they lose money on it. So Amazon and other internet companies and delivery companies are dropping all of their — not all of them — but a big portion of packages into a post office, and the post office is supposed to deliver the packages, and they lose a lot of money,” the president told reporters in the White House during the signing of a bill funding the latest round of coronavirus stimulus.
“The post office, if they raise the price of the package by approximately four times, it’d be a whole new ballgame. But they don’t want to raise because they don’t want to insult Amazon, and they don’t want to insult other companies perhaps that they like. The post office should raise the price of the packages to the companies, not to the people, to the companies, and if they did that, it would be a whole different story,” Trump continued.
“If they don’t raise the price, I’m not signing anything, so they’ll raise the price so that they become maybe even profitable but so they lose much less money, OK? And if they don’t do it, I’m not signing anything and I’m not authorizing you to do anything,” he said, referring to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and to documents that would confirm the loans.
The president later said on Twitter: “I will never let our Post Office fail. It has been mismanaged for years, especially since the advent of the internet and modern-day technology. The people that work there are great, and we’re going to keep them happy, healthy, and well!”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said earlier Friday that she was told that Trump had personally ordered that no money for the Postal Service be included in the current bill.
“They told me, it came right from the president: No money for the post office,” she said during her weekly press briefing.
