Politics - News Analysis

Postcard Mailed to Americans to Boast of Trump’s Role in Stimulus Checks Cost $28 million

Nothing like campaigning and having the American citizens pick up the tab. We have all seen campaign mailers. They can be extremely effective because it is one sure way to get a piece of information in someone’s hands. TV commercials can be turned off, internet ads ignored, radio – same thing. But a mailer is in the person’s hands and usually printed with information on the outside. It almost inevitably gets read.

Oh, the downside is that those mailers are also ungodly expensive, as you might imagine. To be effective they have to go out to a lot of people which requires big printing costs and even bigger postage costs.

Donald Trump believes he can do whatever he wants and thus he simply had the government pay for his mailer, or so it would seem. From USA Today:

A postcard mailed to every American household that included coronavirus social distancing guidelines and also prominently featured President Donald Trump’s name cost the U.S. Postal Service $28 million, USA TODAY has learned.

The coronavirus card, which began appearing in U.S. mailboxes in March, drew fire from good-government groups that said it applied a political veneer to the administration’s effort to inform Americans about the pandemic. The cost comes as the U.S. mail service – which Trump has described as “a joke” – is struggling financially.

See? It is so easy. Trump puts out a nice friendly “good-government” postcard with his name printed very prominently on it and people think that you’re on the ball and doing a great job. And the good part for Trump is that the $28 million isn’t billed to the campaign!

One could report the matter to the FEC which monitors elections and file a complaint, stating that the mailer looks a lot like a campaign postcard. But Trump has failed to appoint three members to the FEC, leaving it staffed with only three. FEC needs four to impose sanctions.

Violations like these have been planned for a long time.

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Peace, y’all

Jason

[email protected] and on Twitter @MiciakZoom

meet the author

Jason Miciak is a political writer, features writer, author, and attorney. He is originally from Canada but grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He now enjoys life as a single dad raising a ridiculously-loved young girl on the beaches of the Gulf Coast. He is very much the dreamy mystic, a day without learning is a day not lived. He is passionate about his flower pots and studies philosophical science, religion, and non-mathematical principles of theoretical physics. Dogs, pizza, and love are proof that God exists. "Above all else, love one another."

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