It was mass hysteria last week when former President Barack Obama accused current President Donald Trump of trying to sabotage the U.S Postal Service by removing mailboxes.
Hysterical social media users retweeted images of a flatbed truck carting off blue mailboxes in Portland, Oregon.
“They’re going around literally with tractor trailers picking up mailboxes,” Democratic nominee Joe Biden said at a virtual fundraiser. “You oughta go online and check out what they’re doing in Oregon. I mean, it’s bizarre!”
The chaos reached peak hysteria on social media after Obama accused Trump of giving the direct order to remove the boxes.
“What we’ve seen in a way that is unique to modern political history is a president who is explicit in trying to discourage people from voting,” Obama said during his former campaign adviser David Plouffe’s podcast on Friday.
“What we’ve never seen before is a president say, ‘I’m going to try to actively kneecap the postal service to encourage voting and I will be explicit about the reason I’m doing it.'”
Obama added, “That’s sort of unheard of.”
But USPS spokeswoman Kimberly Frum told The Hill that the removal of mailboxes is actually quite common.
Thousands of mailboxes were removed during the Obama/Biden administration to be refurbished and relocated to high traffic areas.
“When a collection box consistently receives very small amounts of mail for months on end, it costs the Postal Service money in fuel and workhours for letter carriers to drive to the mailbox and collect the mail.”
She added that anyone with a residential mailbox can simply raise the flag on their box to have their mail picked up.
USPS spokesman Steve Doherty told Boston.com there’s nothing to see here: “These trucks are on the street daily. They’re part of our field maintenance fleet.”
Roughly 14,000 USPS mailboxes were removed and relocated between 2011 and 2016 — during the Obama-Biden administration. No one accused Obama of sabotaging the USPS.
In 2016, Obama proposed that the USPS slash 12,000 jobs, saying private mail carriers like FedEx and UPS were more efficient. “It’s the post office that’s always having problems,” he added.
The National Association of Postal Supervisors President Ted Keating fired off a letter to then-President Obama.
“Your negative references to the Postal Service without knowledge of the facts was a disservice not only to the members of our organization, but to all postal employees,” Keating wrote.
In response to the fake news, the USPS announced they will stop removing mailboxes until after the November elections.
“We are not going to be removing any boxes,” USPS spokesman Rod Spurgeon told NBC News. “After the election, we’re going to take a look at operations and see what we need and don’t need.”
