The Mandate That Wasn’t
News, protesters and other assorted characters at the Constitution Center prior to the Presidential Debates 10 September 2024. Photo by Michael Stokes, CC BY 2.0
Donald Trump won this year’s presidential election. The Former and Future Guy is true to form in acting as though his victory is an overwhelming mandate from the people for radical (and I do mean radical) change. But while Trump’s victory was decisive, a landslide it wasn’t. And claiming a mandate that doesn’t exist is not going to end well for Republicans.
Consider these facts:
- CNN now places Trump’s share of the popular vote at 49.9 percent. While still a popular vote win, Trump apparently did not win a majority.
- Trump’s current margin of victory is only 1.6 percent.
- The current count has Trump leading by only 2,592,489 votes out of more than 150 million nationwide.
- Trump won the swing states by less than 120,000 votes.
None of this means that Trump’s victory was not legitimate, but it does mean that it was razor thin. A different decision by fewer than one percent of the nation’s (or swing state) voters would have put Kamala Harris in the White House.
A prudent politician would factor this narrow margin into his agenda. The American people are not sold on Donald Trump or his Agenda 47. Statistically speaking, half of the country didn’t want him back. The election did not give him a carte blanche to drastically change the country. He was not given the all clear to make power grabs, eviscerate the federal government, or generally abuse the powers of his office.
But Donald Trump is not a prudent politician. He is also a lame duck before he enters office since he is constitutionally limited even though he has referred to a possible third term. Trump cares nothing for the Republican Party he will leave behind and thus he has very little reason to exercise power responsibly.
That isn’t true for many of the people who will staff his Administration. A great many people who will work in the Trump Administration have political aspirations of their own. Whether these aspirations will be enough to rein in the majority tendency to overreach remains to be seen, but I’ve seen little reason to hope that they will.
If Trump and the Republican overreach, it will follow a pattern that goes back at least as far as the first Trump Administration (and a lot further in reality) when the former president took office with less of a mandate than he has now and proceeded to enact a very partisan agenda with no regard for winning over moderates and independents. This was particularly short sighted since Trump lost the popular vote in 2016.
The Biden Administration followed and made the same mistake. Biden had a mandate to not be Trump but progressives interpreted that as a mandate to try to ram through a left-wing wish list rather than addressing concerns of swing voters. Democrats just paid a heavy price for their policy errors, particularly when it came to culture war issues. One of the most devastating ads of the cycle attacked Harris’s support for transgender treatments for prisoners and transgender athletes in school sports, saying, “Kamala is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you.”
Now Trump seems poised to perpetuate the cycle with appointees from the MAGA lunatic fringe and poorly conceived policies. Trump recently posted confirmation that he planned to declare a national emergency and use the military for mass arrests and deportations of illegal immigrants, but polling shows that majorities of Americans that would include a sizable number of Trump swing voters favor a pathway to legalization and oppose mass deportations. Public opinion will probably become even more opposed to deportations as Americans see first hand what such a policy looks like.
Tariffs are a more popular policy at the moment, but this may change as the policy is put into place. When voters start to understand that they, not foreign companies, are paying the tariffs through higher prices, see American companies suffering from Trump’s trade war, and feel the affects of a slowing economy, tariffs will probably lose popularity. High consumer prices were a major reason that Harris lost so enacting a policy that will raise them higher seems particularly tone deaf.
Some Trump voters are already having second thoughts based on what they’ve seen so far. Among those are Muslim voters in Michigan who backed Trump because of Biden’s support for Israel. CBS News reported that Trump’s Arab backers are disappointed over both Trump’s appointment of staunchly pro-Israel Republicans such as Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, and Elise Stefanik as well Trump’s failure so far to appoint prominent Muslim supporters to his Administration. The Arab voters hope that Trump would push for a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon, but that seems unlikely.
Donald Trump may not be concerned about electoral blowback from unpopular policies and alienating voters, but other Republicans should be. The GOP is going to have to find a way forward after Trump, and that task will be much more difficult if Trump leaves the country in economic decline and filled with ticked-off voters.
Democrats may be learning the lesson that Trump failed to grasp. Kamala Harris ran a somewhat centrist campaign and the Democratic Party is currently in the throes of navel gazing after the red wave. They might well decide that the progressive left is an albatross that needs to be dumped in order to make a play for the middle. If the Democrats become a sane, centrist alternative to MAGA Republican wingnuts, the party might stage a comeback much quicker than Republicans expect. There’s suburbs have been a key to recent elections and the suburbs don’t like crazy.
So far, neither side has learned from the repeated mistake of trying to do too much too quickly and getting rebuked by the voters. The first team that does learn from the past may be able to usher in a long term majority, but one that won’t enact radical change as much as preserve the status quo.
It’s far from a sure thing but if either side is going to internalize the truth that a two-percent win is not a blank check, my money would be on Democrats after their recent “shellacking.” Since Trump has been on the scene, Republicans seem incapable of learning anything.
When I started voting at the age of 18, sane centerists were known as Republicans. Democrats were further to the left, most notably in their pursuit of and support for labor protections and environmental and social justice. Those stances have somehow become radical leftism in our current discourse. Hell, VP Harris wanted to expand home buying tax credits to help with the screwy housing market and got called a socialist for it.
Democrats my indeed abandon those of us more to the party’s left, but trying to become RINO’s hasn’t exactly worked out well for them either. That’s the real lesson. You can either support corporate capitalists – e.g. be neoliberals economically – or you can support ordinary folks/labor which is now apparently socialism. There is no center to that ground.Report
If you were a completely amoral, unprincipled, and cynical leader of the Democratic party, someone who cared about winning elections but had no concern whatsoever about policy of any kind, what lesson would you take from this election?
1) OP links to a piece by Eugene Volokh (no radical socialist he!) pointing out at a 1% shift in voting would have shifted both the White House and the House of Representatives to Democratic control.
2) Trump got only a few more votes than he did in 2020 but Harris got a lot fewer than did Biden last time around, so it was Democrats (or at least previous Democratic voters) not turning out that cost them the election, not Republican enthusiasm for Trump.
When I put those things together, I conclude that to get back over the top, Democrats probably don’t need to shift policy positions all that much, but to the extent they do, they need to shift right, not left. Why? That’s where the people who actually vote are.Report
They also need better and longer term messaging discipline and to take the media to task publicly.Report
“Who should the Democrats have run instead of Kamala?”
If you can’t answer this, you’ve illustrated the problem.
There’s also a handful of discussions you can have about how much damage an open convention would have done to the party, I guess…
Much easier to just say “Kamala actually did pretty well. Nobody could have done better.”
“We’ll get him next time.”Report
Thing is, “Kamala actually did pretty well. Nobody could have done better” appears to be true.
Anywhere Harris campaigned heavily went for her. The money she spent worked for her.
What swung things was that there were more places that she didn’t campaign heavily, and those places were coin-flips, and enough of them came up Trump to matter.
“Well, why were so many of those places coin-flips” is a decent question but it’s not one that the Harris campaign was going to be able to answer with only three months to work.Report
This. if we want to go back to situations other than those we found ourselves in, we can stipulate that Biden would not seek renomination and an open primary process might have given us a candidate who could have won. Maybe it would have been Harris with more time to get herself out in front of the voters, but maybe not. Then you can name any pale-skinned penis owner you think might have done better, and you might be right. Not that there would be any way to tell, but it would be a sensible alternative history to pursue. That’s a very different question, though, from how well Harris played the hand actually dealt.Report
I understand you are a very young man with egg still in your face, but in the olden days of the Bush Jr administration we were told that 50% +1 is a majority, and Republicans pushed their policies without any interest in trying to build any consensus with the other side (the Hastert rule, in substance if not in name, predates the Bush II administration, being established by Republican speaker Newt Gingrich). In other words, I barely remember the time when Republicans were willing to consider what Americans that voted for the other guy might want.
A long winded way to say I was never expecting Republicans to care about alienating voters or reaching out to moderates and independents.
And I definitely oppose Democrats being 90% of the opposition to Trump’s craziest shenanigans (plus 1 or 2 safe Republicans). If the institutional GOP doesn’t want Project 2025, the institutional GOP, a majority of the majority, must vote against it.
Otherwise, let the 50% +1 run their policies in full. It is not as if they didn’t run on them.Report
But Trump distanced himself from Project 2025!Report
LOL. I wonder if there’s anyone in these here United States that actually believed that.Report
Trump won the electoral college and popular vote. Rs won a majority in both chambers of congress.
That’s the definition of a political mandate. (look it up)
If you want to quibble on the “size” of said mandate, you’d have an argument. But to deny that a mandate was not earned is ridiculous.Report
A political mandate is just a social construct.
Literally, in this case.Report
“X is a social construct.”
I never know whether to interpret this as “X isn’t real” vs. “X is real in some really troublesome ways”.Report
I’m old enough to remember when the definition of a recession had to be changed because of reasons.Report
Honestly, as someone who believes that gender is a social construct in a fairly extreme sense, I don’t think that most people who use it, either to say that it is a social construct or to say that it isn’t, understand that “social construct” doesn’t = not real.Report
Money is a social construct. Is it unimportant?Report
It’s real in some really troublesome ways!Report
So is an election.Report
John is correct in the dictionary sense.
In the political sense, at least as I understand it, a mandate is the overwhelming majority voting for someone. LBJ beating Goldwater by 22% is a mandate, FDR beating Landon by 24% is a mandate, Nixon over McGovern by 23% – mandate, Reagan trouncing Mondale by 18% is a mandate.
What is not a mandate is Trump by a percent and a half.Report
A mandate is simply the authority given to democratically elected officials.
It has nothing to do with the margin of victory. If people are are conflating “landslide” with “mandate”, they are mistaken. These words are not synonyms.Report
I mean, this is semantically true in the dictionary sense but also not at all true in the vernacular sense, so not sure how this is helpful to a discussion.
If you don’t think “mandate” is used, in general conversations about politics among both politicians and the politically active, as meaning “significant broad support” I don’t know what to tell you except you’re the weirdo.Report
Not sure how it’s helpful to a discussion to resort to name calling, but if you don’t consider winning the Presidency and both chambers of congress a mandate to try and deliver on a party’s platform, you’re an unserious person.Report
The sort of pedantic dude who is going to pull out Merriam Webster for the sole purpose of having a conversation other than the one that is actually happening out in the world is inevitably the same sort of dude who complains about name calling when you point out that this is not helpful to the conversation and tosses out a name calling response right at the end of that comment.
But I’ll do you a solid and engage with the bit of substance you put in here anyway:
Yeah, uh, I expect any political party who seizes structural control to actually try to do things. I also expect that when the political party that has seized the power tries to do things that are broadly unpopular, they will lose the support that gave them the structural access to the power. And given the nature of both our two-party structure and the broad unpopularity of the bulk of the GOP’s policy positions, I think it’s both inevitable that they will occasionally be in power and when they are they will do broadly very unpopular things and lose that power as a consequence.
They could actually change that by removing some of the fairly unpopular things from their preferred policy list, but the True Believers would rather do things like say, “Hey, we got structural power we will pretend it must be because Americans actually like our whole party platform including all the stuff that we know from repeated feedback they hate”… like… use… the word “mandate” explicitly to mean what the general vernacular use of the word means.
That’s kinda what this whole conversation is about.Report
Oh, so you see what I did there…. Congratulations?
But at last … finally, something worth discussing.
” the broad unpopularity of the bulk of the GOP’s policy positions ”
What part of his mandate to close the border, end forever wars, cut federal bureaucracy and unwind DEI do you think is broadly unpopular? And if not one of those, which of his “fairly unpopular” policies would you remove from the platform?
Obviously how that mandate is executed – and the actual results they achieve will determine if Americans have buyers remorse. And like always, voters will have an opportunity to revoke that mandate with the midterms.
History suggests they will, and not necessarily because of these campaign promises.
Both parties know that the time to make hay is when the sun shines. And right now, the sun is shining on the GOP.Report
“What part of his mandate to close the border”
The border is not open.
“end forever wars”
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are over. For the first time since 2003 there is not a U.S. combat presence anywhere in the world. Both wars were ended under Democratic administrations (the second, most famously, under terms set by Trump and both wildly criticized by the GOP because Obama/Biden was actually doing it).
“cut federal bureaucracy”
Pop quiz did the size of the federal government (a) grow or (b) shrink from 2016-2020? More on this in a second.
“and unwind DEI”
I don’t even know what this phrase means, and neither does anybody else.
So. Aside from the vaporware and the made-up stuff what is actually in the platform that you think is going to happen?
Did you notice that you didn’t mention “deport 11 million people”? Because I did. Did you not mention it because you think it’s going to be unpopular or because you don’t think Trump is actually going to deport 11 million people because he lied about that (and is still lying about it)?
Hey a huge boilerplate part of his speechifying was “get inflation under control”. Do you think deporting 11 million people will raise inflation? Kinda think it might. Do you think that will be popular?
What about tariffs, something else you oddly didn’t mention in spite of the fact that along with “deport 11 million people” was *the* staple policy proposal he has talked about. Do you think that’s going to add to inflation? Do you think that will be popular? Or… do you think he’s not going to do that, because he was just lying about it?
Do you think Trump is going to abolish the DoEd? He says he is. What happens to the Office of Civil Rights? Because absent the DoEd and the OCR, every SPED parent in America will suddenly find that their local school district can just… stop offering them FAPE and there’s no avenue of recourse. Do you think that will be popular?
Do you think the admin is going to remove federal policies on vaccinations? He says they are. Do you think the sudden uptick in Measles and Polio is going to be popular?
His admin has promised to remove taxes on Social Security, overtime, and tips. Hey, you didn’t mention those things either. Do you think he’s going to do them? Do you think it will be unpopular when he passes a four year moritorium on Social Security taxes but has to have it sunset because he can’t get the tax bill through on a party line vote… you know, basically what happened in 2017… oh, hey, do you think everyone’s taxes going up this upcoming year is going to be popular? They are… well, unless you make all your money off of the market, because the middle class tax cuts of the 2017 tax bill are all going to be gonzo by 2026 but the capital gains tax cut is permanent. Remember who passed that bill, I forget.
“do you think is broadly unpopular? And if not one of those, which of his “fairly unpopular” policies would you remove from the platform?”
Here’s one thing I know for sure:
What Trump just sold this country on is a bag of promises that he can’t keep, because they contradict each other.
Pretty sure that’s going to be unpopular, when the rubber hits the road, because he can’t actually do them without a lot of consequences that people won’t like.
Now he will argue (of course) that all of those inevitable consequences are not in fact his fault, and he will offer scapegoats, and people may actually buy that bag of bannapants horseshit, because by God we already saw how this guy governs and everyone absolutely dumped that knowledge down the drain once so they might do it again.
But if you don’t see this year as yet another case of the dog caught the car, brother, I don’t know what to tell you.Report
It’s amazing how 15 million people managed to enter the country illegally through that closed southern border. I can only imagine how many more would have crossed if it were left open! Thanks for clarifying. I have no idea how many people will actually be deported, certainly not 11 million, but simply securing it, stopping the inflow and deporting a material percentage of those who should absolutely not be here – will prove quite popular.
Speaking of noticing omissions, I’m very happy to hear that the stalemate in Ukraine/ lame-duck escalation w/ Russia nor the Israel-Palestine conflict do not count towards forever wars. Such a relief to know that the military industrial complex hasn’t just moved off Afghanistan and on to other profit centers of death and misery. I’m sure neo-cons and the dems who love them will really hate peace in Ukraine, but I think most of America might actually like that to happen.
As for the federal bureaucracy, i can’t think of anything on this earth more in need of major disruption. But breathless “what if” scenarios about losing x, y or z is the real vaporware.
I can’t help but notice you’ve conflated a lot of Trump’s promised policies with potential poor outcomes. This attempt to shift the discussion from ” the broad unpopularity of the bulk of the GOP’s policy positions ” today to things that may be unpopular in the future is an admirable slight of hand. Hell, you may actually end up being correct! But unfortunately it does little to support your claim that Trump’s policy positions are actually unpopular two months before he takes office.Report
“It’s amazing how 15 million people managed to enter the country illegally through that closed southern border.”
It’s actually not all that amazing because that’s not how most of them got here. Hm, perhaps that’s why you think the border is open, because you don’t actually know how people get into this country in the first place.
“Speaking of noticing omissions, I’m very happy to hear that the stalemate in Ukraine/ lame-duck escalation w/ Russia nor the Israel-Palestine conflict do not count towards forever wars.”
Oh, arms shipments now count as “forever wars”? Sorry I didn’t realize that was a new rhetorical bait and switch thing.
(I think most of America will blithely ignore the collapse of the post WWII international political sphere, for whatever it’s worth, until it bites them in the ass)
“As for the federal bureaucracy, i can’t think of anything on this earth more in need of major disruption. But breathless “what if” scenarios about losing x, y or z is the real vaporware.”
LOL, look, dude, if this is the quality of your engagement I guess we’re just done here.
If you’re not willing to talk about the potential impacts of policy… why are you here, exactly? Just to cheerlead possibilities on vibes?
“The things that Trump promised to do that might be unpopular, or have unpopular consequences, are not serious parts of the conversation, only the parts that will be popular” is a hell of a take.
“I can’t help but notice you’ve conflated a lot of Trump’s promised policies with potential poor outcomes.”
Yes, see, that’s how policy conversations actually work in the real world. It’s not “an admirable slight of hand”.
“Hell, you may actually end up being correct!”
Report
You’re the worst kind of troll.
Refuse to answer the question.
Start a new adjacent conversation because you can’t answer the question.
Become indignant about someone not letting you off the hook.
Happy Thanksgiving anyway. You must be a joy at the dinning room table.Report
“I’m sure neo-cons and the dems who love them will really hate peace in Ukraine…”
For the Roman definition of “peace”, of course, but hey, who cares what happens to a bunch of Polack Jews, right? If they were worth anything they’d have moved to America, right?
“But breathless “what if” scenarios about losing x, y or z is the real vaporware.”
(that clicking noise you hear is Puccio frantically deleting his tweets about how Harris will institute confiscatory gun-control policy and make it a felony crime to own ammunition)
“I can’t help but notice you’ve conflated a lot of Trump’s promised policies with potential poor outcomes.”
hey so when you talk about how Harris would’ve done thus-and-so and it would’ve been so bad, would you say that’s “conflating…promised policies with potential poor outcomes”, and if not why not?Report
“For the first time since 2003 there is not a U.S. combat presence anywhere in the world.”
The US is engaged actively in the Red Sea, has bases in Syria that are routinely the subject of bombardments, and was a major part of the defense against Iran’s attack on Israel in April 2024. You’re right that we don’t have tens of thousands of troops occupying large parts of foreign countries, but it’s really not true at all to say there’s “no combat presence anywhere in the world”.Report
So, you open with the “if you believe X, you’re basically a Nazi” salvo. Really clever.
Then you proceed to attach some random opinions to me that I’ve never asserted here or on Twitter.
That clicking noise you hear is Ducky making stuff up.
I take back what I said about the other guy. You’re the worst kind of troll.Report
“technically we won, according to the rules” is not the kind of thing that you say when you’re confident that people like you and are happy that you came out on top.Report
If Republicans win, it is an overwhelming mandate. These are the rules of the media and the media is hardwired for RepublicansReport
I think that what you think of as “the media” and what I think of as “the media” must be two different things because it strikes me as a lot more likely that “the media” has a credibility problem.
But maybe we’re just using the same term two very different ways.Report
Mandate is as mandate does.
The modern Federal machine has 1-yr to execute whatever their mandate heart desires… and which can muster 60-votes in the Senate.
…or can be maneuvered through a reconciliation bill on straight party-line votes.
…or is no longer subject to the filibuster.
…or nukes the filibuster.
…or — and this is the real meaning of a mandate — voting against the proposed ‘Mandate Legislation’ will cause you to lose your next election because the Mandate Party will take their mandate for this legislation and use it for that.
Clearly the Republicans have a reconciliation bill level of mandate.
It could, however, attempt to leverage an ‘Immigration Mandate’ because many Dems campaigned on Immigration and the Dems are concerned about Immigration at the polls … so Trump could position a Trump inflected Migration Bill that needs the support of 7 senators to pass. It all depends on whether there are 7 Senators who are vulnerable to the *Immigration Mandate*… or Dem leadership that is worried about campaigning against Immigration Reform and pressures for a general consensus bill. But make no mistake, it will be a general consensus bill of Trump’s influence, not the weak tea that was served prior to the election.
I never have any confidence that Trump and his team can execute on these sorts of things… but if he does, that’s what he can accomplish before 2026 as part of a ‘Mandate’ strategy.
That, and I assume they can just extend the TCJA for 4 (8?) years via reconciliation? In some ways it’s ironic that Trump wanted the TCJA to expire on his successor’s watch, but now that he’s the successor, he can probably just extend it 4 or 8 more years (depending on the limits of Reconciliation).Report
It also feels like the Dems aren’t quite as steamroller-proof as they were in 2017.
The Resistance made sense. You were on the right side of history, you won the popular vote, Black Lives Mattered, Hashtag Me Tooed, and THIS IS MY FIGHT SONG.
Now?
Here’s a sports op-ed from the NYT: Christian Pulisic, the Donald Trump dance and why true leaders consider the impact of their actions.
Limp. Lifeless.
It’s true that Washington DC has a machine that can stand against Trump (indeed, it has). But I’m not sure that the machine has a full tank like it did in 2017.Report
Yeah, but as I said on Twitter… I’m not sure Trump is qualified to exploit a Trump victory at the polls.
He might buckle down and focus on shepherding legacy defining legislation through congress; or he might appoint Matt Gaetz and just f*ck around with the DOJ for two years. Hard to say, really.Report
Not really. But we all know that.Report
The interesting thing will be when the Congressional Democrats shut down government again, will it be interpreted as “brave adults standing strong against a squalling toddler throwing a tantrum because he can’t have a toy” or as “I recognize that you find your principles really important and I respect that but also we need to have a functional country”…Report
Golly, I sure wish we had a press that wasn’t obviously in the bag for the Democratic Party right about now…
Hey. Wait a second… Didn’t the WaPo refuse to endorse Harris?
Maybe they’re worth listening to…Report
Interpreted by whom? I said in an earlier thread that the Dems are going to come crawling back to the filibuster.Report
Put simply, mandate is as mandate does.Report
I should just stick to 280 characters, nay 140.
But all this whitespace with and expandable box? Too tempting.Report
No man has possessed the Mandate of Heaven since the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1912.Report
Some have suggested that the ability to dodge bullets is an indicator of the Mandate of Heaven.Report
Heh. A fortunate turn of the head doesn’t count.Report
In the movies? No.
But in real life? What would dodging bullets even look like in real life?Report
No one dodges a bullet in real life. It’s either bad aim or luck that saves you.Report
“Hey, Vincent, don’t you see? That sh*t don’t matter. You’re judging this sh*t the wrong way. I mean, it could be that God stopped the bullets, or He changed Coke to Pepsi, He found my f***ing car keys. You don’t judge sh*t like this based on merit. Now, whether or not what we experienced was an “according to Hoyle” miracle is insignificant. What is significant is that I felt the touch of God. God got involved.”
[Joke aside, I think the unprepared kid on the roof missed. Missed close, but missed all the same]Report
Heh!
I thought the analysis showed but for DJT turning his head at an extremely fortunate moment he’d be deader than a doornail. I didn’t really follow that story too closely.Report
Gaetz withdraws his nomination: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/11/21/us/trump-gaetz-newsReport
Very interesting. If I had to guess someone figured out that there was no way in God(ess?)’s green earth that they could keep that congressional report under wraps.Report
Look for a soft landing at Heritage.Report
Gaetz may not be able to accept it but I think Trump just used him to see where the bar would be with the GOP caucus, or if there would be any bar at all.Report
I’m curious to see if he takes his seat in the next congress… I’d assume yes, but seeing some armchair House Rules mongering that he resigned from both current and future congresses.
Maybe he figured he was going to get Santos’ed so he’s indifferent… but if not, would be the first of many who’s careers Trump will end.
Rubio up next.Report
Gaetz always seemed like a negotiating tactic to me. A ready-made concession to get other nominees like RFK and Tulsi over the line.Report
Doesn’t seem plausible. Trump doesn’t play 11th-dimensional chess and Gaetz apparently pulled out on his own, so there was no Trump “concession.”Report
This is not 3D, let alone 11th dimensional chess. It’s basic negotiating. Strategic concession, anchoring, etc. Can we agree that this is something he is pretty well versed in after a life time in commercial real estate?
Regardless is it is intentional concession or not, Gaetz being withdrawn improves the path of other nominees. The guy everyone hated is out of the picture. It’s a win for GOP senators. I doubt the other nominees will receive much resistance (unless some new bombshell drops on one of them of course)..Report
There isn’t any indication that Trump negotiated with anybody. Unless you think floating a self-evidently bad and extremely vulnerable choice out there that he didn’t have to make and letting nature take its course counts as negotiating. Even that assumes he had some idea of the likely outcome of the move, wanted it, and had some end in mind that that outcome would serve — and there’s no indication of that either.Report
Who on earth do you think Trump ‘negotiated’ with here?
Trump has literally never been competent at anything, ever. He certainly hasn’t in real estate, where he has managed a constantly failing empire that gets propped up by the _money laundering_ that is ‘New York high-end real estate’ and even failed at both that and _running multiple casinos_, eventually getting bailed out by a TV show that decided he was celebrity enough to be on reality TV.
It really doesn’t. It literally does the opposite. If Gaetz had stayed in, and gotten to a nomination fight, and _other_ unqualifiyed-but-not-at-the-level-of-hiring-underaged-prostitutes nominees got in while he was being debated, sure, we could pretend that was some clever strategy by Trump.
But we are _two months away_ from the Trump presidency and the actual nomination fight. Gaetz didn’t improve the path of anything! Everyone just immediately moved on to the fact that Pete Hegseth is _also_ someone who is unable to be a normal person about sex, because he apparently raped a prostitute he hired, which he denies…not the prostitute part, the raping her part.
The only person that vaguely came out ahead in this entire thing was Matt Gaetz, who was mostly able to pretend his resignation was for reasons besides ‘Congress about to release damning report on him’.Report
Referee: Okay, everyone, the football game is starting in an hour, and I want this to be a clean game.
Democrats: Are we going to address the fact the opposing quarterback is not eligible to play and appears to be wired with dynomite? We object to that?
Low bang goes off as the quarterback explodes, followed by dozens of people running around completely naked, general circus for seven minutes.
Referee: *AHEM*. As I was saying, the football game is starting in 53 minutes, and I want this to be a clean game.
Democrat: Um, okay, so, the quarterback blew up, so we withdraw our objection to him, but, like, we also object to these other guys too.
Trump defenders: As you can see this was all a clever plan by Trump’s team to distract the other team while he repeatedly scored! He is so smart! *gestures at scoreboard, which is not lit up yet as the game has not started*Report
“Gaetz always seemed like a negotiating tactic to me. ”
Gaetz was Trump’s Kyiv; an assault that bogged down almost immediately and was rebranded as a “strategic diversion”.Report