A year ago this week, CNBC published a report noting that psychology experts have identified the techniques successful liars use to get people to believe them. It noted that successful liars, for example, make a habit of “adding details in an attempt to sound convincing.”
The more Donald Trump talks about his electoral “mandate,” the more that CNBC report comes to mind.
When the president-elect sat down with Time magazine late last month, he was predictably eager to brag about his victory. “[T]he beauty is that we won by so much,” the Republican boasted. “The mandate was massive. Somebody had 129 years in terms of the overall mandate. That’s a lot of years.”
The specificity of the claim might’ve led some people to believe it. That would be unfortunate.
I won’t pretend to know the identity of the “somebody” whom Trump referenced, but the claim was demonstrably ridiculous: He won a second term fair and square, but he clearly did not win by a margin unseen in “129 years.” In terms of the Electoral College, just in recent memory, Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan easily outpaced the 316 electoral votes Trump won this year.
As for the popular vote, according to the latest tally from the Cook Political Report, the president-elect won 49.8% of the vote, a margin of 1.47% over Vice President Kamala Harris. (The Democratic nominee, interestingly enough, came up short while winning a higher percentage of the popular vote than Trump received in 2016 or 2020.)
The New York Times recently published a compelling analysis along these lines, explaining that the Republican’s victory “was neither unprecedented nor a landslide.” It added, “In fact, he prevailed with one of the smallest margins of victory in the popular vote since the 19th century and generated little of the coattails of a true landslide.”
In the Time magazine interview, however, Trump suggested he was quoting someone else — a common rhetorical game he likes to play, giving him an out when his bogus claim is exposed as false. (He’ll often say something along the lines of, “I was just saying what I heard from others.”)
This week, he dropped the pretense, publishing an item to his social media platform in which he simply asserted, “I won the biggest mandate in 129 years.”
The problem is not just that Trump is peddling made-up, easy-to-disprove nonsense. The problem is made worse by his motivations for doing so.
The Republican, his team and its allies are apparently feeling a bit insecure about Trump’s underwhelming win — one in which slightly more Americans voted against Trump than for him. The incoming president and his sycophants, meanwhile, want at least to try to claim that he’s the one true voice of the nation and that policymakers have no choice but to obey the American Electoral Colossus.
Left with little choice, in other words, members of Team Trump are lying because the truth is too inconvenient to leave intact.
Whether Republicans like it or not, using the word “mandate” over and over again will not change the outcome or the vote tallies.
This piece updates our related earlier coverage.
Page 2
If you saw it in a movie, you’d probably think it was implausible to a cartoonish degree: An unelected billionaire, after effectively purchasing influence, attaches himself to an American political leader and starts sitting in on meetings with foreign leaders, huddling with members of Congress, helping kill legislation for reasons that don’t make sense, weighing in on cabinet choices, and heading up a powerless advisory panel that the political world is pretending has real authority.
All the while, leading public officials — who were actually elected to positions of authority — coordinate their policymaking efforts with this billionaire as if he were in a position of real influence.
But this isn’t the basis for an overwrought Hollywood script; it’s American politics as 2024 comes to an end. There’s reason to believe, however, that the public isn’t overly impressed. A HuffPost report highlighted the latest public opinion research related to Elon Musk and his affiliation with Donald Trump:
Musk’s role in the still-nascent Trump administration is at least somewhat controversial among the public: A YouGov poll found 48% of Americans had a favorable opinion of Musk, while 42% had an unfavorable opinion. The Associated Press found the public generally split in their opinions of Musk, while a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday found a 53% majority of the public disapproves of Musk playing a prominent role in the Trump administration.
The Quinnipiac poll was of particular interest because of the straightforward wording of the question: “Do you approve or disapprove of Elon Musk playing a prominent role in the Trump administration?”
There was, predictably, a sharp partisan divide, but overall, a 53% majority said they disapprove. (Among self-identified independent voters, the gap was 20 points: 57% disapproved, while 37% approved.)
The same national survey found that a 44% plurality have an unfavorable opinion of the billionaire, but that only helped reinforce the larger point: The real public reservations are not about Musk personally, but rather about his outsized role in the incoming Republican administration. (The Quinnipiac poll surveyed 924 self-identified registered voters nationwide from Dec. 12-16 and has a margin of error of +/- 3.2 percentage points.)
At least for now, however, these public attitudes are being ignored: Ahead of this week’s government shutdown deadline, House Speaker Mike Johnson has, by his own admission, been in frequent communication with Musk, trying to convince him of the merits of a stopgap spending bill as if the billionaire had a vote on Capitol Hill.
Those efforts have not succeeded, but what matters is the fact that the Republican Party’s top official on Capitol Hill felt the need to appeal to an unelected billionaire for support.
The Louisiana congressman isn’t alone: Other GOP lawmakers are also reaching out to Musk in the hopes of advancing their legislative priorities, too.
Democratic officials, meanwhile, have begun referring to the world’s wealthiest individual as “President Elon Musk“ and the nation’s “Shadow President,” and it’s tough to blame them under the circumstances.
Of course, Trump has a history of resenting those who try to share his spotlight, and it’s not yet clear whether the president-elect will tolerate his billionaire pal generating so much attention that he wants for himself.
