THE HUBRIS IS THE ONLY THING THAT MIGHT SAVE US

President Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy have clearly been trying to sabotage the postal system because they know that Trump will lose a properly conducted election with a large number of mail-in votes. But they thought they could just dismantle sorting machines, remove mailboxes, and cut overtime without anyone noticing or doing anything to try to stop them. The president, whose formative experiences with the media taught him that you can get whatever kind of coverage you want if you feed a handful of journalists and gossip columnists a few juicy stories and quotes, appears to have been unprepared for the possibility that an independent press would vigorously cover his misdeeds and describe them accurately. DeJoy was forced to back down. He promised he'd suspend the sabotage until after the election.

But the damage is already done, and is unlikely to be undone, as ABC News reports.

As questions over recent changes implemented at the U.S. Postal Service continue to mount, new images obtained by ABC News appear to show mail sorting machines -- critical pieces of equipment used to speed up the mail delivery process -- sitting in parts in a postal facility in Portland, Ore.

The machines are wrapped in yellow caution tape after having recently been decommissioned and broken down into parts within the last month, according to the postal employee who took the photos....

At least six sorting machines at the Portland facility alone have already been taken offline in the past month, according to Joe Cogan, the head of Portland's postal union. Their fate remains unclear....

Sorting machines have been removed in cities across the country in recent weeks, according to local reports in Michigan, Oklahoma, and Kansas, among others. Similar issues were raised when images emerged showing the removal of some blue mail collection boxes across the country.

On Tuesday ABC News Washington, D.C., affiliate WJLA broadcast photos of what sources reportedly told the outlet were sorting machines being disassembled recently at a postal facility in Maryland.

They've already gotten away with quite a bit of sabotage, but they also seem to have thought that their sabotage wouldn't become an issue in the campaign, and that the press will meekly agree with Trump on election night when he says that there's no need to count mail-in ballots because he won the in-person vote.

In the 1980s, Trump had New York City gossip journalists wrapped around his finger; over the past decade, he's had a similar level of control over his favorite media outlets, Fox News and OANN. He doesn't seems to understand that the rest of the news media won't simply declare him the winner with millions of votes still to be counted, and will report it if there's an attempt to trash millions of ballots that were legally cast. It will be an easy story to report because he's being so brazen about wanting to do it.

So the hubris might be the only thing that saves us in November. Trump's cheating will be so obvious that he might not be able to attempt it without a real public outcry.