Trump’s ‘Unprecedented and Powerful Mandate’ Is a Lie
Upon learning that he had won a clear election victory, Donald Trump responded, as is his custom, with a transparent lie. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” he gloated.
Reporters did not bother pointing out that there is no sense in which this claim lies anywhere within the range of plausibility. When you’re talking about historical precedent, impressive mandates that come to mind are Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and Richard Nixon in 1972, all of whom won by more than 20 percentage points. Polarization has made victories on this scale apparently impossible, but even in recent years, Bill Clinton’s victories (five and then eight points) and Barack Obama’s (seven, four) dwarf Trump’s.
At the moment, Trump is leading the national vote by around three points. California’s agonizingly slow vote-counting process traditionally ensures that the Democratic candidates gain vote share in the weeks after the election. Even at its current level, finding a mandate larger than Trump’s requires you to go back no further than four years, when Joe Biden trounced him by four and a half points, causing Trump to famously reject the outcome.
Why bother with this particular Trump lie, which hardly stands out in his lifetime of pathological dishonesty? Because Trump’s supporters are leveraging the shock of his victory to discredit the political opposition. “If you go down this road of preventing this government, which just won a mandate, from doing anything, you will again pay a price,” warns Republican message vehicle Scott Jennings on CNN.
There is a quadrennial tradition in American politics for the winning party to insist its victory amounts to an endorsement of its entire platform by the American public, while the opponents chalk the results up to personality or fleeting events.
In part, the mandate talk reflects this familiar ritual. In the big picture, Trump won because literally every opposition party running for office anywhere in the world is winning right now. Every single governing party in the developed world that has stood for reelection in 2024 has lost, the Financial Times notes. This has never happened before in the 120 years of data it has followed.
Trump exploited economic discontent and, just as he did eight years before, will almost certainly rebrand the economic recovery he inherits as a booming wonderland of prosperity. The program that Trump claims America voted to implement is a combination of promises Trump never had the slightest intention of fulfilling (no taxes on tips or overtime pay), promises Trump will probably try to implement in some form but would be catastrophic if carried out in full (funding the government through tariffs, deporting every illegal migrant or asylum seeker), and promises Trump rarely talks about but will almost certainly pursue (giving rich people a huge tax cut, reducing health-care subsidies for the poor and people with preexisting conditions). The mandate rhetoric is in part a traditional effort to gull the opposition party into withholding criticism and treating the enactment of the president’s plans as a natural outcome of the election.
Yet the 2024 version of the mandate question has far more serious overtones because Trump’s highest priority has nothing to do with policy. Trump has made it plain that his highest priority in office is to take revenge upon his enemies and intimidate his critics. Jennings cited Jamie Raskin, a House Democrat who has organized advance defenses of civil society in the event of a Trump return, as an example of excessive resistance to Trump. “Can we just have a couple years of peace?” pleads Jennings, as if Trump has any intention to leave his opponents alone.
Democrats have already given Trump his due. Kamala Harris conceded election defeat unambiguously, as Hillary Clinton did in 2016. Neither made any attempt to overturn the outcome. When Joe Biden took office, he even allowed John Durham, Trump’s handpicked special counsel, to continue his fruitless investigation into the imagined “deep state” plot against Trump.
In his victory speech, Trump did call for putting the divisions of the past behind us. He is capable of magnanimity when his power is unchallenged. Those fleeting gestures should not be mistaken for a temperament that is compatible with democratic politics. He craves dominance and regards all opposition as illegitimate and, in most cases, criminal. His supporters are already salivating at the prospect of pursuing charges against a litany of Trump critics. Here, to take one example, is John David Danielson in The Federalist calling for Trump to sic the Justice Department on Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, Christopher Wray, and “everyone else at Biden’s DOJ who was involved in these lawfare cases against Trump”:
“Democrats cannot only fall back on opposition to Trump. They must seriously reexamine the failures of the Biden presidency and the pathologically self-defeating habits of the progressive movement infrastructure.”
But Democrats should not psych themselves out in advance by accepting the notion that Trump somehow represents the Real America, or that the public will only reward them for cooperating with his litany of crackpot schemes and payoffs. It is both the nature of human life in general and democracy in particular that sometimes bad guys win. Winning does not make them cease to be bad.