We keep hearing from Trump himself, his co-President Elon Musk, and his drink-spiking, lovechild-fathering spokesperson Jason Miller that our incoming president has been given a very strong and very powerful mandate by the American people.
Central to these "mandate" claims is the fact that in 2024 Trump—finally—won the popular vote at his third attempt which, as Miller told CNN, "changes everything." Trump is the GOP's first popular vote winner in 20 years. (It's been 36 years since a Republican—George H.W. Bush in 1988—won the popular vote at the first attempt.)
According to Jason Miller, "winning the popular vote provides a mandate and a national public confidence to accomplish what he wants to do from the Oval Office, especially with regard to fixing the economy and securing the border."
In other words, after defeating Harris by 2.3 million votes, Trump has supposedly been given an even more powerful "mandate" than the American people gave Al Gore in 2000, but less of a "mandate" than they gave Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Winning the popular vote is not what it used to be
As Trump said in during the 2016 campaign, "the system is rigged against our citizens." He proved it in November 2016 when, despite a massive loss in the popular vote, he was elected President.
Our political system is most obviously rigged at the Presidential level, where "voters in small states have more Electoral College votes per capita than larger, more diverse states."
In fact, because the system's so "rigged against our citizens," today's Democratic Presidential candidates must win the popular vote by 3-4% to guarantee an Electoral College victory. (If Trump had simply narrowed his loss to Biden from 4.5% to just 3.9%, analysis shows, he would have won in 2020.)
Our rigged system is why, in three tries, Trump has won the Presidency 2X as often as he has won the popular vote.
It's also why, even when Biden defeated him by more than 7 million votes in 2020, Trump still got more Electoral votes than Clinton did in 2016, after she beat Trump by 2.9 million votes.
As the examples of 2000, 2016 and now 2024 prove, Trump's claim of a popular vote "mandate" is meaningless.
In reality, the increasing emphasis on the Presidential "swing states" has so affected turnout—and incentives to turn out—that it is now impossible to view the current national totals as a true reading of what the popular vote would be if everyone knew their vote for President actually mattered.
What would the popular vote look like if the Electoral Vote were to be abolished? That's something Democrats would like to know and Republicans—the beneficiaries of this rigged system—will never let us find out.
Popular vote losers have inflicted major damage on America
Despite his second-place finish in 2016, Donald Trump, like George W. Bush before him, was able to use his power to reshape the Supreme Court with hard-right political appointees. (Bush's Supreme Court appointments occurred in a second term that would not have happened if he hadn't been appointed to the Presidency by the Supreme Court in 2000.)
In a single term, popular-vote loser Trump was allowed to name not one, not two, but three Supreme Court Justices, creating a court that "is not just corrupt, unethical and extreme," but which also poses a serious threat to American freedoms for decades to come.
Five of the six conservative members of today's highly corrupt, highly politicized Supreme Court—Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett—were given their jobs for life by two presidents who first ascended to office despite losing the popular vote. That's a majority even without adding Clarence Thomas, the most scandal-prone political hack of them all, to the scales of injustice.
Thanks to Trump and Bush, today's court is as rigged as the X algorithm
As Trump enters the White House for the second time, he will be backed by the most conservative Supreme Court since American Nazis were first holding rallies in Madison Square Garden in the 1930s.
It's a court that holds the kind of long-term, minority-derived power that makes a mockery of the idea that America is a democratic republic governed by its people and motivated by the desire "to form a more perfect Union." And it's wielding its power corruptly.
The court proved just how corrupt it is by deciding that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment—which bans a candidate from running for office ever again after inciting an insurrection—didn't apply to Trump.
The court then took its extremism to an entirely new level in a decision to give Trump "absolute immunity" for official acts, even though the ruling lacked "any basis in the Constitution or historic tradition."
Between 2016 and 2024, Trump colluded with Russia and committed crimes that helped him steal an election, lost the popular vote, committed many more crimes while in office (including at least 10 counts of obstruction detailed in the Mueller Report for which he should have been arrested the minute he left office), was impeached, lost the 2020 election in a landslide, incited an insurrection, was impeached a second time, and then stole classified documents that he hid by a toilet and refused to return when asked to do so.
These days, Trump is fond of comparing himself to the legendary gangster Alphonse Capone. But the comparison would be more appropriate if Capone had hand-picked the judge in his tax evasion trial and the judge, ignoring all the evidence, had set not only set Capone free, but also given him a "Get Out of Jail Free" card to protect him from future prosecutions.
While many of Trump's political, legal, and business accomplices have been convicted for crimes that Trump personally directed, the Supreme Court has repeatedly intervened to help Trump delay his trials and prevent him from going to prison. It has also ensured that this known business fraud, insurrectionist, and 34-times convicted felon—who's also a self-confessed serial sexual predator recently found liable for "shoving his fingers inside a woman’s vagina without her consent”—is now, effectively, a King.
Adding insult to democratic injury, Trump's "coronation" by the Supreme Court occurred despite the fact that—after three attempts—he hasn't once managed to exceed 50% in the popular vote.
What usually happens to people who lose the popular vote?
It's hard to imagine a Democrat who lost the popular vote by 2.9 million votes (as Trump did in 2016) would ever be allowed back on a national ticket. But if that Democrat did run again only to lose by more than 7 million votes (as Trump did in 2020), the party would certainly not continue to embrace him as its leader.
Today, Kamala Harris is widely viewed as a failed candidate even though she lost to Trump by fewer votes than Trump lost by in 2016.
Al Gore was quickly dubbed a "sore loser" despite winning the popular vote and being cheated out of the Electoral College win by a combination of factors that rigged the system against him, including poorly printed ballots, a mostly forgotten insurrection known as the "Brooks Brothers Riot," and the dubious, one-time-only Supreme Court ruling to seal Bush's win.
Hillary Clinton, after being denied victory by a multitude of known crimes, foreign and domestic, conceded defeat anyway and quickly retired from election politics.
As Richard Florida wrote in 2016, Clinton accepted defeat even though she: "captured the largest metros. She bested Trump with 55 percent compared to 40 percent of the vote in metros with more than one million people, and won eight of the ten largest metros. These metros accounted for more than half the vote and generate two-thirds of America’s economic output."
Four years later, the runner-up in the 2016 popular vote was causing mass death—and exploding the national debt.
Even before Covid lockdowns began, Trump had failed on the economy, bringing the record-breaking Obama-Biden recovery to an end and putting America on track for trillion-dollar-deficits ad infinitum with his unfunded tax cuts for corporations and the rich.
In 2020, Trump's mishandling of Covid was both pathetic and psychopathic. It not only caused hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, it also cratered the US economy.
Trump's catastrophic pandemic response was just the latest in the list of disasters that have occurred since 2000 precisely because America's rigged system allows Republicans to become President even after finishing second in national elections. (See also: Bush's failure to stop 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the crash of 2008, the Trump farm crisis, and more.)
How our rigged system benefits Republicans in Congress
Trump, of course, is not the only Republican who benefits from this thoroughly rigged system.
In the House of Representatives, the GOP's relentless focus on gerrymandering, particularly since 2010, has created an out-of-the-gate advantage for their party and reduced the number of competitive districts to—as of 2024—just 27 out of 435.
As the Brennan Center reported, "over three times as many districts were competitive in states where independent commissions drew maps as in states where Republicans drew maps."
One side effect of this anti-democratic system is that today's MAGA Congresspeople don't even have to think about actually governing or serving their constituents. With their coffers full and their re-election guaranteed, thugs like Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene can focus on playing to their Fox News (and Steve Bannon and Q-Anon) audiences and "owning the libs" through the corporate media's constant coverage of their idiocy and outrages.
It's even worse in the Senate which, writes Vox, "undermines principles of equal democratic representation" by allowing 7 million Americans in Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming to elect 16 senators while 149 million Americans living in California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas get only 14.
In the 50-50 Senate of the Biden era, Democratic Senators represented 40 million more voters than Republicans.
In the coming Congress, the Republican Senate majority, while continuing to represent a minority of the electorate, will likely bow to Trump-Musk pressure and confirm multiple unqualified and unsavory Cabinet nominees, no matter how unpopular they may be with most of the American people. And in the new Trump-Musk era, the Senate GOP's previously unwavering commitment to protecting the filibuster will be put to a test it will likely fail.
(If you thought things were bad in Washington DC.... the New Yorker wants to inform you that "State Legislatures Are Torching Democracy." Read that here.)
For decades, the "vast right-wing conspiracy" exploited our rigged system...
While the origins of America's rigged system date back to the Founding Fathers, the mess we're in today was made possible by a "vast right-wing conspiracy" that Hillary Clinton first warned us about in the innocent days of the 1990s. (The '90s being a time when Presidents could still get impeached for consensual sex, instead of adjudicated rapists earning multimillion-dollar paydays from The Walt Disney Company.)
Conservatives have "played the long game" over many decades. The vast right-wing conspiracy has been funded by deep-pocketed donors like the Koch brothers who, after they finally quit the John Birch Society, invested heavily in building a long-term political infrastructure to influence policy and shape public opinion. Co-conspirators included think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, which published its first "Mandate for Leadership" in 1981 (a.k.a. "Project 2025" this time around) and the Federalist Society, which focused on creating a reliable legal pipeline—one that pumped out names like Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett—in an effort to steer the courts in a more reliably conservative direction.
Reagan's repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 paved the way for Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and todays rabidly partisan, fact-averse rightwing media ecosphere.
In 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision unleashed unlimited spending by corporations and the wealthy, enabling "dark money" to dominate elections like never before.
The growth of the internet and years of right-wing (dark-money-funded) attacks on the "liberal media" have taken a toll on traditional news outlets. Today's corporate-owned TV networks now reliably accept Republican framing of major issues. Major newspapers are controlled by billionaires and private equity firms. Fifty-five million Americans live in "news deserts" where they lack reliable reporting on local issues (limiting citizens' awareness of corporate malfeasance and political corruption).
Meanwhile, the rapid expansion of social media has enabled conspiracy theories and fringe ideas to take root in the dark corners of the internet and allowed the "manosphere" to spread like a fungus, radicalizing young men with a constant diet of anti-feminist, far-right ideas.
By the time Trump arrived on the scene in 2015, Republicans had grown accustomed to losing elections because, despite having gamed the system, worked the refs, and moved the goalposts for years, they still had one YUGE problem: Their ideas not only sucked, they were also massively unpopular.
... Republicans thought Trump had finally won the game for them...
The GOP gradually, grudgingly accepted the carnival-barking clown as their leader because, it turned out, the poorly educateds loved him. The fact that Trump combined the worst attributes of Harvey Weinstein, Bernie Madoff, and Benedict Arnold only made the conservative voters the Times routinely spoke to in Ohio diners love the immoral con artist traitor more.
By 2024, the Christo-Fascists who were itching to execute all 900+ pages of Project 2025 were resigned to the fact that Trump was not only their only viable national candidate, but also the cognitively impaired buffoon they needed to make people ignore "the true evil they represent."
November's election proved that the system was finally rigged to perfection.
... Then Elon Musk grabbed the ball
That's all for now. More on Elon later.
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P.S. This really is the time to get off X once and for all. Please find me on Bluesky and these other places.
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