President Donald Trump may have called the U.S. Postal Service a joke, but as Devin Leonard told Boston Public Radio on Wednesday, the service "traces the history of the country, and in many ways the ideology of the country and the intellectual growth of the country."
The Postal Service is failing financially, and its leaders warned recently that it could collapse without a bailout. This comes months before an election where many people may vote by mail, due to fears of voting in person during the coronavirus pandemic.
Leonard, a journalist at Bloomberg and author of "Neither Snow Nor Rain: a History of the U.S. Postal Service," said he's more optimistic about the future of the Postal Service than others.
"I don't think the Republicans are going to let it fail," he said. "They're in no rush to bail it out, but I don't think they want to be blamed for the Postal Service's failure. The one thing, just like people freak out when the Postal Service tries to close their post office in their area, I think they'd freak out if all of a sudden they weren't getting mail because Congress didn't bail them out."
