Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election with 49.8 percent of the national popular vote — compared with 48.3 percent for Vice President Kamala Harris — and 312 electoral votes to Harris’s 226. Overall, looking at the 20 presidential elections since the end of World War II, Trump had the fourth-narrowest margin in the popular vote and seventh-narrowest in the Electoral College.
And yet this objective fact about the 2024 election — that it was a narrow result in a closely divided nation — does not seem to matter, all that much, to the nation’s politics.
Two views of the 2024 presidential results predominate in our political discourse.
The first, held by the president, his allies and his administration, is that the election was an overwhelming landslide — a historic landslide — the most devastating victory a candidate has ever won in American political history.
Or as Trump put it: “We achieved the most epic political victory our country has ever seen.” In February, he told audiences at the Conservative Political Action Conference that he had earned “much more” than his 77 million votes and that his poll numbers were the highest “that any Republican president has ever had.” His allies and aides, likewise, repeatedly refer to last year’s election as “historic” or a “mandate” of some sort.
In this vision, Trump’s victory was so total — so complete — that the 2024 election was an enabling act for everything he wants to do. Does Trump want to illegally slash large parts of the federal bureaucracy and impound congressional appropriations? Oh, he had a mandate. Does he want to end diversity efforts, not just in the federal government, but across the entire society? Well, the American people delivered a landslide victory to him.
His every move — his every action — is justified by the supposed scale of his electoral success. Even the Constitution is supposed to bend in the face of his 312 electoral votes, hence his effort to end the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship by executive fiat, now before the Supreme Court.
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The post ‘The Most Epic Political Victory’ Is Nothing of the Kind appeared first on New York Times.
