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.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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