Donald Trump Does Not Have a “Mandate” for Any of This
Samuel Corum/Pool/CNP/Zuma
In the 1932 presidential election, Franklin Delano Roosevelt wiped the floor with his Republican rival, Herbert Hoover. He won the Electoral College 472-59, and bested the incumbent with 57 percent of the popular vote. It was a decisive rout at a time of crises—a devastating depression, soaring inequality, rising fascism in Europe—and FDR embraced it, launching his New Deal. “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy,” he declared in his inaugural address. “The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action.”
President Donald Trump, who is doing his best to undo what remains of FDR’s legacy, made similar claims in January—and in his address to Congress on Tuesday—of his own, narrow, victory, itself a response to crises ranging from real (inflation, war) to entirely fabricated (an immigrant crime wave, the Big Steal). “My recent election,” Trump remarked during his inaugural address, “is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and, indeed, their freedom.”
He was hardly the only one invoking the m-word. “Trump is back with a big agenda, a mandate—and an axe to grind,” noted a Politico headline.
Management and Budget officials justified their freeze on federal grants and loans based on “the will of the American people,” who had given Trump a “mandate to increase the impact of every federal taxpayer dollar.” Elon Musk, who has glommed onto Trump like a ravenous limpet, told White House reporters that “you couldn’t ask for a stronger mandate” to eviscerate the administrative state: “The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what people are going to get.”
Did they really? In his speech on Tuesday, Trump claimed—absurdly—that the November election “was a mandate like has not been seen in many decades.” In fact, Trump won less than half of the popular vote—which, given the turnout, amounts to less than one-third of registered voters. His margin of victory was the tightest since 2000, the fourth tightest since 1940. Subsequent polling showed solid majorities opposing his tariff plans, birthright citizenship ban, withdrawal from the Paris climate deal, January 6 pardons, and the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. (People hated that.) Even Trump’s own supporters deemed it unacceptable for him to impose loyalty tests on federal workers (58 percent) or to pardon friends or supporters convicted of crimes (57 percent). And this polling came before Trump unleashed Musk and his post-pubescent underlings on federal agencies like a swarm of diseased locusts.
“In the US, usually claiming a mandate is done when a victory has been particularly large,” Terry Royed, a political scientist at the University of Alabama and co-editor of the 2019 book, Party Mandates and Democracy, told me via email. “Trump’s popular vote margin was not large.” And when you consider his Electoral College margin and House and Senate swings, “Trump didn’t do super-well there, either,” she added.
Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Richard Nixon in 1972. Ronald Reagan in 1984. Those were big, decisive victories. But mandates? Marquette University political scientist Julia Azari, who scrutinized more than 1,500 presidential communications for her 2014 book, Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate, questions the entire premise. Take 1964, she says: “Some people were voting affirmatively for LBJ’s agenda, but what really fractured the Republican coalition and led to that landslide was the fear of [Barry] Goldwater and the unpopularity of the things he was saying. And even there, there’s a lot to choose from.”
Azari views mandates as merely a “construction”—an idea that has been used by monarchs, dictators, and (small d) democrats alike to justify their power since at least as far back as imperial China, when dynastic kings asserted a “mandate of Heaven”—a divine right to rule.
The Western notion of a mandat—as a command or judicial order—came about amid 16th century upheaval in Europe, as Reformation figures began challenging the hegemony of the Catholic Church. Before then, “authority and inequality were linked; men of wealth and noble birth were also in charge of exercising the functions of government. The vast bulk of the population was politically irrelevant,” the late German-American sociologist Reinhard Bendix—who was expelled from secondary school in 1933 for refusing to give the Nazi salute—wrote in his 1978 book, Kings or People. “After 1500, the rigid bond between authority and inequality loosened.”
The first American president to use the mandate concept as a power flex, Azari says, was Andrew Jackson, a Trump favorite. Elected in 1832, Jackson set out to destroy the nation’s fledgling central bank, she wrote, “rationalizing his actions by claiming the president enjoys a special popular endorsement.” Eighty years later came President Woodrow Wilson, whose racist segregation of the federal workforce is echoed in Trump’s DEI purges—and who, in 1908, wrote of a victorious presidential contender, “Let him once win the admiration and confidence of the country, and no other single force can withstand him, no combination of forces will easily overpower him.”
Presidents of both parties, including Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, have since touted their electoral results to advance their agendas. But Trump and his minions have taken the claim to outlandish extremes, as if winning an election can empower a president to defy democratic norms, federal law, and the Constitution itself. As if the people had elected a king. (Trump has even hinted of his own mandate from Heaven, declaring, of his fortuitous turn away from the assassin’s bullet, “I was saved by God to make America great again.”)
Mandates are typically invoked, Azari has observed, when a president is on the defensive or when he seeks to vastly expand his powers. Both apply to Trump—whose approval ratings in reputable polls have never exceeded 49 percent—but also, interestingly, to FDR, who, frustrated by a conservative Supreme Court striking down some of his New Deal policies, declared his 1936 re-election results a mandate “to save the Constitution from the Court and the Court from itself.” The following year, he backed a bill, which failed, that would have let him add six new justices to the court. (Trump’s toadies are calling for the impeachment of judges who rule against his executive actions.)
Some within Trump’s brain trust are openly supportive of his authoritarian ambitions, viewing the dismantling of government as a counterrevolution against an antidemocratic bureaucracy. “We are living under FDR’s personal monarchy 80 years later—without FDR,” the billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen said on a podcast in December.
Andreessen was paraphrasing his “good friend” Curtis Yarvin, a self-styled political philosopher of the tech right who has lamented America’s “kinglessness.” Now, he added, “you need another FDR-like figure but in reverse…somebody who is actually willing to come in and take the thing by the throat.”
But voters, for the most part, did not sign on to wipe out FDR’s accomplishments—or Johnson’s for that matter. Indeed, unlike Trump, FDR was reelected with an impressive majority. He won 60 percent of the vote, and took every state except Maine and Vermont. Mandates may not be real, Azari emphasizes, but margins matter. “There was a lot of popular support for the New Deal,” she told me. “There’s not necessarily a lot of popular support for undercutting the New Deal, undercutting the Great Society, and doing so in a way that has no procedural legitimacy.”
Will of the people? Hardly. Trump eked out a comeback win and kept himself out of prison—no more, no less.