No Popular Mandate for this Insane Administration
Image by René DeAnda.
In the opening days of his second presidency, the malignant, orange-sprayed fascist maniac Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump has, in the words of the Revcom Corps (RCC) for the Emancipation of Humanity’s call for Nationwide protests on Saturday, February 1:
“unleashed a hailstorm of fascist shock and awe, [issuing] executive order after executive order to restructure society, ethnically cleanse non-white immigrants, erase trans people, seize territories, accelerate environmental destruction and more – all this enforced by measures aimed at silencing and punishing dissent within government and private institutions while pardoning and backing the hardened January 6 shock troops to intimidate and terrorize those who would resist.”
The RCC’s call was written even before Herr Trump tried (last Monday night) to freeze federal funding for a vast swath of government programs and before he declared (two days ago) his intention of sending 30,000 victims of his immigrant round-up to detention camps in Guantanamo.
It should be noted in the wake of last night’s major air collision in Washington DC, it should be noted that Trump on his second day back in power fired the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and removed all the members of the nation’s Aviation Security Advisory Committee. The committee, mandated by Congress in 1988, “will technically continue to exist but it won’t have any members to carry out the work of examining safety issues at airlines and airports,” the Associated Press reported.
This morning (I am writing on Thursday, January 30), Trump insanely but predictably[1] tried to blame the crash on “woke” hiring practices initiated by the supposedly radical left Biden and Obama administrations. As a comrade wrote me from the drought-plagued and fire-plagued California coast, “these fascists can blame everything from wildfires to plane crashes on migrants and ‘wokeness’ (code word for women, brown, and black people).”
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Again and again during her first nationally televised press conference three days ago,Mein Trumpf’s Orwellian press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that the new White House’s reckless and radically reactionary Blitzkrieg reflects the democratically expressed will of “the American people” demonstrated in Trump’s “sweeping election victory,” which has given him a great popular “mandate.”
Leavitt’s claim is absurd.
It is false in 6 key ways:
1. Between a Third and a Quarter of the Nation’s Adults voted for Trump
Trump’s official vote total, more than 77 million, is equivalent to just 29 percent of the nation’s voting age population. Don’t let anyone tell you “half the country voted for Trump.”
2. Trump’s Tiny Popular Vote “Victory”
Trump’s 1.5 percent official popular vote victory is one of the smallest ever in the history of US presidential elections — a small fraction of Lyndon B. Johnson’s 23 percent landslide victory in 1964. Trump failed to get a majority of the popular vote, at 49.7 percent, unlike George W. Bush in 2004 (50.3 percent), Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 (53 percent and 51 percent) and Joe Biden in 2020 (51 percent). While Trump won all seven swing (contested) states, his 312 Electoral College tally barely bested Biden’s (306) in 2020 and pales before Obama’s (365) in 2008 and Ronald Reagan’s (525) in 1984.
3. “A Mere 0.15 Percent of Voters Nationwide”
We go from 1.5% to 0.15% when we look at the popular vote through the filter of the Electoral College, which effectively reduces US presidential contests to a handful of contested states. As the election lawyer Mark Haider and the Princeton PhD candidate Aiden Calvelli recently demonstrated:
“Trump defeated Harris 312 to 226 in the Electoral College and won 2.3 million more popular votes. But had Harris won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — which Trump won by just 230,000 votes — then she would have secured exactly the 270 electoral votes needed for the win. A mere 0.15 percent of voters nationwide was the difference between Trump’s second term and Harris’s first.”
“Is that really a mandate?,” Haidar and Calvelli rightly ask. “Under the Electoral College — where a handful of swing states are central to the outcome,” they note, “a small number of fortunate, ‘determinative’ voters ultimately pick the president….[our finding] puts into plain sight how close we actually were to a different election outcome…So yes, Trump clearly won the 2024 election. But it was no blowout — and he has no major mandate.”
4. Suppression Won
And no, Trump did NOT “clearly win the 2024 election.” I’ve been waiting for the venerable voter suppression expert Greg Palast to crunch the numbers on the 2024 election. His highly credible analysis went public six days ago. Palast credibly finds that Trump owes his 2024 “victory” to racist voter suppression. “Trump lost,” Palast reports:
“…if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes. And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass ‘vigilante’ challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million….America deserves an answer to this question: Excluding a boost from Jim Crow vote suppression games, did Donald Trump win? From the shockingly huge numbers we’ve [discovered…] of provisional and mail-in ballots disqualified, the postcard purge operation, the vigilante challenges and so on, we can say, with reasonable certainty, Trump lost — that is, would have lost both the Electoral College and popular vote totals absent suppression.”
To see the specifics and methodology behind Palast’s conclusion, see his report here.
5. The Dismal Democrats
The Democratic Party was rightly labelled “the inauthentic opposition” by the astute Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin eighteen years ago. It is a cringing “neoliberal,” capitalist-imperialist party allegiant above all to corporate donors and investors. It surrendered whatever claim it had to be a “party of everyday people” and “the working class” long, long ago. No mass outpouring of popular support is required to defeat this depressing, dollar-drenched, and demobilized party and its transparently disingenuous and inauthentic candidates, who kept many decent people from voting last fall by backing a US-sponsored genocide in Gaza. The dismal Democratic Party is a Weimar organization that opens the door to Republi-fascist takeover and constantly conciliates the Reich-most major party. No mass mandate is or was required to defeat the dismal dollar Dems.
6. Voters Vote on Candidates, Not Detailed Policy Agendas
Trump is carrying out policies and taking actions worked up in detail for him by Christian white nationalist neofascists linked to Project 2025, the elaborate, many-sided “far-right” policy agenda put together by an army of revanchist policy wonks under the umbrella of the fascist Heritage Foundations. Many of Trump’s recent actions – the funding freeze is a graphic example – cannot reasonably be said to have been on the presidential ballot last November. Some of his Shock and Awe campaign can be credibly said to have been on the ballot , of course — mass deportations, the January 6 pardons, and “drill baby drill,” for example — but the fact remains that the US quadrennial election spectacles are much more about candidates than they are about policies. More than 77 million Americans did not vote for Trump to freeze funding for Medicaid and veterans’ suicide prevention programs or to end FEMA, for example.
Some liberals and moderates tell me that we need to “just hunker down and ride through this storm” without rising up against it because, as Barack Obama and Joe Biden told them, this is the outcome of America’s supposed great democratic process. “You win some and you lose some,” the argument goes, “and when you lose you get back up and try again in the next election. Trump is our president now. The American people have spoken. Better luck next time. That’s democracy!”
What democracy? Those who are advance-surrendering to this unfolding fascist nightmare on the grounds that this is the sorry but “legitimate outcome” of “American democracy” as demonstrated in the 2024 elections need to take a closer look at how the “democratic” US political system works.
That system is far from a “democracy,” as I have shown with no special claim to originality in numerous books, essays, and talks.[2] And this is true whichever of the two dominant capitalist-imperialist parties holds down the US presidency.
That aside, the claim that Trump’s unfolding fascist Blitzkrieg reflects the democratic will of the people must be thoroughly rejected.
Endnote
1. As I wrote this morning on so-called social media: “Has Trump blamed the airplane-helicopter crash over the Potomac on Wokeness yet?”
2. For starters, see Paul Street, They Rule: the 1% vs. Democracy (NY: Routledge. 2014); Paul Street, “The Real Constitutional Crisis: The Constitution,” CounterPunch, November 8, 2019, https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/11/08/the-real-constitutional-crisis-the-constitution/