After winning the popular vote by the one of slimmest margins among post-Second World War presidential victories, The Fascist Guy ‘thinks’ he has an ‘unprecedented’ mandate; he does not. TFG’s popular vote victory places him in 16th place, just behind Jimmy Carter, but ahead of his 2016 performance when he lost the popular vote but still won the keys to the White House. Although TFG won the Electoral College by 312 to 226, he is estimated to win the popular vote ONLY by around 1.6 percent.
“I’m not sure that other presidents would read that as a mandate, but Donald Trump is a different case,” said Mark Updegrove, a presidential historian and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. “Whether Trump has a mandate or not doesn’t matter. He’s going to tell you he has a mandate because he wants to do what he wants to do. He would exploit any advantage.”
Presidents have historically used real mandates to bring about revolutionary changes. Thomas Whalen, an author and presidential historian at Boston University, said Trump’s claim of an unprecedented mandate was “laughable” when compared to landslides won by Ronald Reagan and Johnson.
“Johnson’s victory against Barry Goldwater in 1964 was a historic landslide, and the Democrats had huge gains in the House and Senate,” Whalen said. “It allowed the Great Society to sail through the next two years. That’s how we got Medicare and Medicaid, federal funding for education, PBS — a whole litany of things.”
“He’s able to make chicken salad with chicken you-know-what. And that’s part of the huckster management style. That’s what he learned from Roy Cohn. Deny reality, never stop fighting, always make your accomplishments seem bigger. And that’s what you’re seeing here,” he said.
