Might but won’t
Trump doesn’t have a great big huge sky-concealing mandate. He barely has a grocery list.
On Election Night, with characteristic modesty, Donald Trump claimed an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” He certainly won the contest legitimately, if more narrowly than many observers initially thought. With nearly all the votes counted, the most complete tabulation, from Cook Political Report, shows Trump’s popular-vote margin over Kamala Harris has dropped from around 3 percent on the evening of November 5 (or about two-thirds of Joe Biden’s margin in 2020) to 1.47 percent (about one-third of Biden’s margin) today. That’s also about 0.6 percent smaller than Hillary Clinton’s national popular-vote margin over Trump in 2016. To make some other comparisons: Barack Obama won the popular vote by 3.9 percent in 2012 and 7.2 percent in 2008, and George W. Bush won the popular vote by 2.4 percent in the very close 2004 election.
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Given that perilous hold on power, Trump might want to reconsider his current strategy of ruling Washington like a devastated and occupied enemy city with a Cabinet largely composed of men and women who appear to intensely dislike the departments and agencies they are supposed to oversee, in addition to a governing plan that may rely on testing the tolerance of the federal judiciary for totally unparalleled assertions of supreme presidential powers. And Trump’s MAGA activists should also cool their jets a bit. There’s certainly a degree of triumphalism in the air that really isn’t justified by the election returns.
Well, Trump might want to do that, in another universe, if he were a completely different person, but in this one, of course he won’t. When does he ever? He just says what he wants to say and does what he wants to do until/unless forcibly prevented. He doesn’t pause to consider the odds or ponder the realities, he just says and does whatever he wants. That’s all there is to The Story of Trump.
This endless parsing of election results MAKES ME PUKE. “Oh, he only won by 1.67%.” Screw you, Writer for New York “Intelligencer.”
The ARSONIST won. That’s all that matters.
That he did not lose by a landslide is an everlasting disgrace.
Still useful to know that it wasn’t the landslide that his followers proclaim. (I bought that though in my defence I pretty much stopped paying attention after “Trump Wins”.)
They were loudly proclaiming a mandate in 2016 too… Sure, he’s got a mandate, it’s “make shit cost less and probably tone down the genderist shit a bit”. Instead we get a “revolution” of Lysenkoism and Maoism.
Parsing the election does have limited value, I agree, but then you’ve got Ruy Texeira proclaiming that the coming realignment is here (it clearly isn’t, though the Republicans probably could’ve brought by changing course on all the rich fucker giveaways). Last week I heard a Democratically-aligned news contributor insisting that the evidence was that flopping back and forth between controlling parties is just the norm now; changing absolutely nothing will deliver the House and the White House in a short time because the Republicans will piss everyone off (he’s probably right in that narrow sense).
Biden’s mandate was to make things normal again… Then he appointed a tranny to HHS (I think?) and made vaccine distribution discriminatory based on identity categories.
What’s that last one? I think I missed it.
Don’t remember the specifics, but Yascha Mounk mentioned it in his last book so I’m inclined to think it’s true. Something along the lines of the ever expanding definition of “essential worker” with a racial equity focus. The courts torpedoed it for being discriminatory. The bones thrown to “progressive” pet issues along the way was a bit egregious.
Incoming natcons (Nazons perhaps?): hold my six pack.