Reality Part II: Mandates
There could be limits to an electoral mandate that exists only in Trump's head
On Wednesday, we looked at the potential for real-world forces to limit Trump’s ability to reshape our lives. Hard reality tends to assert itself differently in governance than in campaigns and getting people to accept fake reality can be challenging when things the president says are at odds with what people are experiencing.
We noted that when a lie is about something distant—like claims about the southern border—it may be easier for Trump’s assertions to be believed or disregarded, but not so when he is insisting that jobs aren’t being lost or prices aren’t going up if in fact they are.
Of course, there will be no limit to the lies Trump will tell. He will distract us with endless outrages and demand we believe that everything good is his doing and failure always belongs to someone else. But that doesn’t mean he will be successful, or at least that he will be successful all the time.
Potentially constraining Trump further is how dramatically he misunderstands his mandate. Out of the gate, Trump has demonstrated no interest in figuring out why voters elected him and has signaled his intention to do whatever he wants. As a malignant narcissist returned to power, this is what we would expect. After all, he sees voters as an extension of him.
Consequently—and predictably—he asserts he has a mandate for everything he wants to do. In the world of his imagination—as amplified by the fake reality of right-wing media—these assertions become facts.
But they are not facts, and the electorate is more than people who live inside the MAGA bubble. That’s why it’s valuable to consider what hard reality tells us about the size and character of Trump’s mandate, because it’s nothing like what Trump says it is.
