Can Democrats Make Peace With Their Favorite Trump-Era Villain?

For Democrats starving for a villain in post-Trump Washington, Louis DeJoy seemed like an ideal candidate for the role. As postmaster general, he’s the most powerful holdover from the previous administration—a Trump campaign donor and logistics executive hired to run the cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service. When DeJoy moved last summer to slow the mail, his critics charged that he was carrying out a Trump plot to help steal the presidential election and degrade a beloved American institution.

DeJoy’s critics, however, were fretting about the wrong crisis. The Postal Service handled the deluge of ballots but not the crush of Christmas cards and packages that followed. The holiday season was a disaster for the agency, prompting many Democrats to renew their calls for his ouster. Yet as the fight turns to the future of the Postal Service, the party is divided over the leader it loves to hate, and some lawmakers are realizing that DeJoy’s vision is not radically different from their own.

Despite the Democratic posturing at the height of last year’s campaign, the Postal Service’s problems predated both DeJoy and Trump. One of the biggest is obvious: People don’t use the mail as much in this century as they did in the last. The agency has recorded $87 billion in