A progressive daily ledger of Trump-world self-owns, legal pain, policy blowback, and bad-faith chaos.
On August 13, 2020, the White House spent the day trying to explain away a Postal Service mess that looked an awful lot like deliberate election interference, even as the administration kept insisting the system was fine.
The strongest Trump-world screwup on August 13, 2020 was the president’s own admission that he was blocking money for the Postal Service because he did not want mail voting to work well. That came as postal workers, state officials, and lawmakers were warning that service cuts and slower delivery could disrupt ballots, medicines, and everyday mail. It was a self-inflicted scandal with obvious political intent and immediate consequences.
The Trump operation wanted to make mail voting look broken. On August 13, it mostly succeeded in making itself look broken instead.
5 stars means maximum fallout. 1 star means a smaller self-own.
The president told a television interviewer that he was holding back Postal Service money because he did not want mail voting to function smoothly. That admission landed during a mounting backlash over service changes and postal delays, turning a policy fight into an open accusation of election sabotage.