By Peter Oliver
According to president-elect Donald Trump, his victory in last November's election delivered a mandate for his incoming administration to act with unrestrained boldness. And it isn't just any old mandate, mind you. According to Trump, it is a mandate of "powerful," "unprecedented," and "massive" proportions. "The beauty is that we won by so much," he told Time magazine, implying that the American people overwhelmingly supported his proposed agenda.
There is, of course, no specific electoral margin that officially defines a mandate, although presumably the larger the margin of victory, the more legitimate (more massive) the mandate. As Trump prepares to take office next week, here are a few numbers to consider.
For starters, more Americans voted in November for someone other than Trump than for Trump. Trump won 49.81% of the popular vote, versus 48.33% won by Democrat Kamala Harris, with the remainder going to third-party candidates. In 56 of the 66 presidential elections held since 1788, the winner's margin was greater than Trump's 1.48%. For hefty winning margins in recent years that might truly indicate a massive mandate, look to Lyndon Johnson's 1964 win by 22.58% over Barry Goldwater or Richard Nixon's 23.15% over George McGovern in 1972. In a historical context, a 1.48% winning margin, with a sub-50% plurality, is about as thin as it gets. Trump has thus introduced an imaginative new concept to the American political lexicon: mandate inflation.
POST-ELECTION EUPHORIA
Regardless, any perception of a mandate, no matter how massive, is inevitably bloated by a post-election euphoria among the winners that typically subsides once the hard work of governing begins. Even after his rout of Goldwater, Johnson was skeptical about the durability of his popularity among voters, grumbling that "the president's mandate rarely lasts longer than six months." Knowing that his popular support was likely to run out of steam quickly, Johnson acted expeditiously. In the first year after taking office in January 1965, he piloted through Congress the passage of one of the most impressive legislative streaks in U.S. history. New laws went into effect on education, immigration, and housing, and highlighting Johnson's legislative success were the Voting Rights Act and a Social Security law creating Medicare and Medicaid.
Johnson, of course, was enabled by an overwhelmingly cooperative (i.e., Democratic) Congress, with 65 Democrats among 98 Senators and 258 Democrats among 434 members of the House of Representatives. Trump will also enjoy same-party (Republican) majorities in the Senate and the House, but the margins are paltry -- just 220 seats out of 435 in the House and 53 Senate seats out of 100. Any Trump-backed legislation will fail if between just two and four Republicans in either chamber vote in opposition.
PRECARIOUS RELATIONSHIP
That precarious relationship with Congress has already been tested before the inauguration. If a truly massive mandate were in play, the Senate would presumably show great deference in its willingness to confirm the president-elect's choices for top executive positions. Instead, there has been a robust pushback, even among some Republicans, on several of Trump's top-level appointees. His original pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, was scuttled well before reaching a Senate vote, and other picks -- Hegseth, Kennedy, Gabbard, and possibly others -- face unusually tough confirmation battles. This is not the historical norm, in which the confirmation process is typically pro forma. That was true even in 2016, when Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton and didn't make loud boasts about a mandate. Yet all of his original top-level appointees sailed through the Senate confirmation process. In the House, although the Trump-backed candidate, incumbent Mike Johnson, was reelected Speaker, the vote was close and contested. No wonder Trump seems intent in his upcoming administration on bypassing Congress whenever and wherever he can, using such tactics as executive actions and recess appointments.
Any mandate, imagined or real, is really less about the person elected than it is about the policies he/she represents or proposes. If public opinion polls are to be believed, Trump's victory -- and hence, his self-proclaimed mandate -- was based primarily on voters' support of his plans for the central issues of the day: controlling inflation and immigration. So, it is curious that, as inauguration day approaches, Trump has had little to say on these topics.
Instead, he has chosen to tilt at geopolitical windmills. Does anyone, including his supporters, believe that his supposed mandate represents a public demand for a possible military assault on Greenland or Canada? Has he been mandated to push through renaming the Gulf of Mexico? These issues -- not inflation or immigration or any other issue of more pressing concern -- have been foremost in Trump's rhetoric heading into the start of his term. Weird.
SPEW OF VITRIOL
And, characteristically, the details of any plans to govern the country have taken a distant back seat to a never-ending spew of vitriol toward any action or any proposal by any member of the Democratic Party. Trump has long seemed to believe that his most important mission as a politician, whether mandated or not, is to create as deep a division as possible between decent (conservative) Americans and that detestable ratpack of slimy, woke liberals.
However large or non-existent Trump's mandate might be in moving forward, the slim size of his winning margin, historically speaking, and the pre-inauguration pushback he has already experienced from Congress indicate that he might do well to heed the wise words of the great political savant, Mick Jagger: you can't always get what you want.
Oliver lives in Warren.
