You have probably seen that this bullshit about a Trump landslide and mandate has been driving me up the wall— pure Trump gaslighting, repeated by a lazy mainstream media. About 10 days ago, we offered some comparisons about Trump’s puny victory compared to… every other president of our lifetimes. His margin of popular vote victory will turn out to be around 1.7%, worse than every president who won the popular vote since Nixon in 1968. And his electoral college win was smaller than the average (346) since 1968. It was just more Trump braggadocio… about as credible as his claims to have had the biggest inaugural audience in history.
This election night boast was typical Trump bullshit: “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” Yesterday, even before Matt Gaetz was forced to withdraw from the Attorney General gladitorial contest Trump unthinkably had thrust him into, Charlie Cook noted that Trump’s honeymoon is basically still-born.
“With the nominations of Tulsi Gabbard as national intelligence director, former Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general, Pete Hegseth as Defense secretary, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary, President-elect Trump would seem to be trying to cancel the airline and hotel reservations before the ceremony has even commenced. Some of Trump’s other nominees, such as Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of State and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum as Interior secretary, are ones that many more-conventional Republican presidents-elect might have chosen. But it is a decent bet that Gabbard, Gaetz, Hegseth, and Kennedy will not all be seated around the Cabinet Room table. How many the Senate will reject isn’t yet clear.”
Trump's team told him there were 5 hard-no votes against confirming Gaetz: Collins, Murkowski, McConnell, Markwayne Mullin (OK) and just-elected John Curtis of Utah. Philip Bump reported that Gaetz now “holds the record for the fastest withdrawal in the transition period” of any Cabinet appointment. “It’s not clear how much goodwill Trump and his team spent on defending Gaetz, but it wasn’t zero. With Gaetz dropping out, the political-future threat now works the other way. Some senators had already agreed to support Gaetz, despite the rumors and allegations that were already public. Those senators might expect their acquiescence to Gaetz’s bid to come up in future campaign ads… By stepping down, Gaetz also makes it harder for other controversial Trump Cabinet picks to get confirmed… Gaetz’s withdrawal both increases the amount of scrutiny that they face and establishes a precedent under which scandal-marred candidates step aside.”
In this era of extreme, negative partisanship, it is easier than ever for a senator from the opposition party to vote against a Cabinet nominee, but it is much harder for one from a president’s own party to oppose. Needless to say, this will not be a fun time to be a Republican senator.
A good argument can be made that a GOP senator contemplating opposing one or more of these four dubious choices may be far more concerned by the blowback from within their own party than by attacks from a Democrat in a general election.
With 23 Senate Republicans up for reelection, compared to just 11 Democrats, theoretically, the GOP will be on the defense. In reality, however, the GOP seats are in many of the reddest, most reliably Republican states in the country. Only two at this point are even plausibly competitive: those held by Susan Collins in Maine and Thom Tillis in North Carolina. Even if Democrats end up capturing both seats, they would only be halfway to the four-seat gain needed to regain a majority.
But the danger facing a GOP senator who offends the MAGA wing is a primary challenge from a conservative or populist candidate. That’s why we may not see another edition of Profiles in Courage head to the printer early next year.
Trump will likely lose some altitude at a time when most newly elected presidents are still sky-high in their poll ratings. It is not hard to imagine this becoming the third time in a row that a newly elected president has misread their election, mistaking a modest margin for a mandate, not appreciating the extent to which their victory was based not on who they were or what they said, but upon who their opponent was and what their predecessor had done.
Self-proclaiming a mandate is a cardinal sin in politics; anyone thinking that voters gave Trump a mandate on Nov. 5 is sadly mistaken. Democrats are understandably shaken and disappointed by Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss, but Trump’s sweep of all seven swing states was hardly a landslide. His victories of 0.9 points in Wisconsin, 1.4 points in Michigan, 1.75 in Pennsylvania, 2.19 in Georgia, 3.1 in Nevada, and 3.32 in North Carolina were impressive yet still within the margin of error for most polls. Only his 5.54-point win in Arizona was worth a raised eyebrow.
Given how few Democrats ended up having problems beneath the presidential race on the ballot, it is clear that the election was a highly focused, targeted repudiation of the Biden-Harris administration. Republicans seem likely to emerge from this election with about 221 or 222 seats in the House, effectively identical to the 221 they held going in, with five seats yet to be decided.
In the Senate, while Democrats did lose their majority, three of their four losses were in states that Trump carried in 2016, 2020, and 2024, making it easy to conclude that God doesn’t intend for Democrats to occupy seats in Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia at this point in time. The fourth came in the decidedly purple state of Pennsylvania. The reality is that Democrats held four of the five purple states they were defending, hanging onto open seats in Arizona and Michigan and seeing both Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Jacky Rosen of Nevada getting reelected. Winning four out of the five purple-state Senate races is not something that happens in a wave election for the other party.
To top things off, none of the 11 gubernatorial races this year saw a change in party, and turnover on the state legislative level was also minimal.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have to wonder what it will be like to go four years with a President Trump who knows he will never have to face voters again, even though they will. Some of these early picks have to give at least a few the gnawing feeling that this will be a very long four years. To the extent that they are virtually married to him for these next four years, this may be a bad omen.
We can cling to hope but the spineless cowards in the Republican Party will cling tightly to the orange menace. Why? Fear for one. 75 million voters fir two. Half the voters voted for HIM. The sickness is in our own population.
I suspect only their direct suffering will change anything. Should we root for suffering, which would be for everyone, not just MAGATs? Yikes. How horrible.