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That's the AP's wholly unfounded interpretation of what Trump said. Later on the article quotes him as saying

>"They want $3.5 billion for something that will turn out to be fraudulent. That’s election money, basically," Trump said during Thursday’s call-in interview.

As I wrote elsewhere, the difficulty with a large-scale increase in mail ballots does not lie with the USPS, but with states and counties without experience with mail ballots, or only with mail absentee votes, that needs to set up the infrastructure to mail them only to eligible voters and receive and process them in November. That's tough to do by early October (giving voters 30 days before Election Day).

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"Wholly unfounded" ???

“They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”

As I quoted earlier, Trump pointed out the fraud potential in doing so, especially given the little time remaining before ballots have to go out.

There isn't really any fraud. Oregon, a state with mail-on voting only, has a actual fraud rate of 1 in a million. One ballot per year is fraudulent. [1]

This isn't about preventing fraud. Mail-in is proven to be secure. Take the words as exactly what they are--limiting votes. He directly states he wants to limit votes. There's no need to try searching around for other meanings when his statement is so direct.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/06/02/low-rates-o...

>There isn't really any fraud. Oregon, a state with mail-on voting only, has a actual fraud rate of 1 in a million. One ballot per year is fraudulent.

Oregon has also been 100% vote-by-mail for two decades. Other states cannot replicate Oregon's experience and infrastructure—often from scratch—by early October.

If only there were some way for people and institutions to learn from the experience of others...

What a specious argument.

If underfunding the post office could combat fraud, that argument would make sense. In reality, a dysfunctional post office will have little effect on highly motivated fraudsters and will disenfranchise the millions of people for whom vote-by-mail isn't a mere convenience.

In fact Trump's rhetoric will be especially motivating for pro-Trump fraudsters who will feel morally vindicated by the endless accusations of fraud by Democrats.

You raise a good point. When Trump throws out an accusation, it's generally a smoke screen to distract from his own malfeasance. His campaign managers have to know that he's lost the moderate vote by gross incompetence and failure to lead. Perhaps the entire goal is to induce fraudulent voting by his remaining supporters.

"Mail in voting" and "absentee voting" are two separate things. Trump issue is with the former, and has repeatedly advocated for the latter.

That is a myth, they aren’t separate things. It’s just semantics which are being manipulated for political purposes. Trump, for example, is voting in the election under Florida’s “vote by mail” option because that’s what it’s called there.

https://dos.myflorida.com/elections/for-voters/voting/