"Mandates" Don't Exist. Power Is What Matters.

Don't listen to Trump's absurd claims that Americans all demand his agenda.

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When all the votes are counted in the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump will have beaten Kamala Harris by about 2 points (or maybe less). The kind of rout that used to be common — Ronald Reagan’s 18-point win in 1984, or the 23-point margins achieved by Richard Nixon in 1972 and Lyndon Johnson in 1964 — are no more. 

But to hear Trump tell it, not only was this election a blowout, the public has issued a stern and undeniable demand for every policy action Trump would like to take. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” he said in his victory speech, and his aides are echoing the claim. “The American people delivered a resounding victory for President Trump, and it gives him a mandate to govern as he campaigned,” said spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. “Winning the popular vote provides a mandate and a national public confidence to accomplish what he wants to do from the Oval Office,” said Jason Miller.

But here’s the reality: Trump doesn’t have a mandate. What he has is power. And that’s what matters. 

If mandates were real, they would operate on both parties. When Trump proposed something Democrats opposed, they’d say, “We may not like it, but the voters gave him a mandate, so we’ll just have to vote for it.” Which of course they will not do. Likewise, there will never be a moment when Trump proposes some unpopular policy and one of the sycophants he surrounds himself with will say “Hold on, Mr. President — do we really have a mandate for this?”

Nobody knows this better than Republicans themselves, who may trumpet their alleged mandates whenever they take the White House, but understand at a deep level that what matters is what you can get away with. And that has only a vague relationship to what the public wants. 

Republicans know mandates are meaningless

That’s true even if you were clear about your intentions during the campaign. For instance, in 2016 Trump said — more forthrightly than Republicans before him — that he was going to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. Which he did, and yet much of the electorate was surprised and upset when it happened. 

If anyone was tempted to say that the voters gave Republicans no mandate to overturn Roe, their response would have been Too bad. It was something they wanted for decades even if the public didn’t, and once they had the ability to do it, they did it. That’s how power works.

Something else Republicans understand: Power precedes policy. While there are many ways to exercise power, the primary goal for Trump and his people is to reconfigure the federal government to remove constraints on his power, whether from independent agencies, civil servants, or the law itself.

That’s the idea behind the dismantling of government laid out in Project 2025 — and by the way, the 922-page document is titled “Mandate for Leadership.” It has also been the driving rationale of the most successful political project of recent decades: the right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court. Since they got their 6-3 supermajority, the court’s conservatives can barely bring themselves to pretend that their rulings have anything to do with the law or the Constitution; they have a particular policy agenda, and they’re going to use their power to carry it out. Because they’re the ones with the power, and nobody can stop them. As Chief Justice Roberts once said, if the public “don’t like what we’re doing, it’s more or less just too bad.” 

It all goes back to Bush v. Gore

While Republicans and Democrats might both talk about mandates when they win the presidency, the difference between them is that Democrats think mandates matter, while Republicans know it’s just for show. I trace this division back to the election of 2000, the genesis of so much of our contemporary politics. Republicans won that election because in Florida, the state that decided the outcome, they were more ruthless about using both official and extralegal power to create the outcome they wanted. In the end it was the Supreme Court’s five conservatives who delivered the election to George W. Bush, in one of the most preposterous and shameful decisions the court ever handed down.

Once he took office, Bush didn’t say Gee, given how close that election was, I don’t really have much of a mandate. He moved as aggressively on his agenda as any president, and before long — especially after the September 11 attacks — everybody stopped asking whether he really had a mandate or whether it mattered, because it didn’t. 

Asked years later about Bush v. Gore, Justice Antonin Scalia responded,“Oh, get over it!” He and his colleagues had the power, and they used it. You don’t like it? Too damn bad. Today, three of the lawyers who aided Bush in the aftermath of 2000 sit on the Supreme Court (Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett). 

Trump’s victory is certainly legitimate; he won, and that gives him the right to pursue whatever policies he likes. But those policies may or may not enjoy the support of the public — and in fact, most of them won’t. Americans are not yearning to repeal the Affordable Care Act, give tax cuts to the wealthy, or do whatever insane things to the health care system Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has planned. And if Trump follows through on his signature economic promise — sweeping tariffs on the trillions of dollars of goods we import from other countries, in effect a gargantuan sales tax — they’ll be none too pleased about the ensuing explosion in inflation. 

Sometimes the public backlash will stop Trump, and sometimes it won’t. His 2017 tax cut, for instance, was spectacularly unpopular, but nothing motivates Republicans in Congress more than cutting taxes for rich people and corporations, so they passed it anyway. That’s why they’ll pass another version of it early next year — it will be the first order of business in the new Congress. They don’t have a mandate for it, but they have the power. 

In a dramatic scene in “Game of Thrones,” the scheming Littlefinger makes a veiled threat to the royal Cersei Lannister, telling her that “knowledge is power” (he knows many things, including that she’s been shtupping her brother). She instructs her guards to seize him and cut his throat, then at the last second tells them to stop, release Littlefinger, step back three paces, turn around, and close their eyes, all of which they do. She then looks a visibly shaken Littlefinger in the eye and says “Power is power.” 

Littlefinger is not completely wrong; politics is complex and multidimensional, and at times knowledge can indeed position you to achieve your aims. But in the end, power is power. And mandates are imaginary.