A year ago this week, CNBC published a report noting that psychology experts have identified the techniques that successful liars use to get people to believe them. It was noted that successful liars, for example, make a habit of “adding details in an effort 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]The good thing is that we won by such a margin,” the Republican boasted. “The mandate was huge. Someone had 129 years in terms of the total mandate. That’s a lot of years.”
The specificity of the claim may have led some people to believe it. That would be a shame.
I won’t pretend to know the identity of the “someone” Trump was referring to, but the claim was demonstrably ridiculous: He won a second term fairly, but he clearly didn’t win by a margin unseen in ‘129 years’. In terms of the Electoral College, Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan, just recently, easily surpassed the 316 electoral votes that Trump won this year.
As for the popular vote, according to the latest count from the Cook Political Report, the president-elect won 49.8% of the vote, a 1.47% margin over Vice President Kamala Harris. (Interestingly, the Democratic candidate fell short, winning a higher percentage of the vote than Trump received in 2016 or 2020.)
The New York Times recently published a compelling analysis along these lines, explaining that the Republicans’ victory was “neither unprecedented nor a landslide.” It added: “In fact, he prevailed with one of the narrowest margins of victory in the popular vote since the 19th century and generated little of the impact of a real landslide.”
However, in the Time magazine interview, Trump suggested he was quoting someone else — a common rhetorical game he likes to play, giving him a way out if his false claim is exposed as false. (He often says something along the lines of, “I was just saying what I heard from others.”)
This week he dropped that pretense and published an item on his social media platform in which he simply claimed: “I have won the biggest mandate in 129 years.”
The problem isn’t just that Trump is spouting made-up, easily refuted nonsense. The problem is compounded by his motivation for doing this.
The Republican, his team and his allies are apparently feeling a bit insecure about Trump’s disappointing victory – a victory in which slightly more Americans voted against Trump than for him. The incoming president and his sycophants, meanwhile, want to at least try to claim that he is the nation’s one and only voice and that policymakers have no choice but to obey the American election behemoth.
With little choice, in other words, members of Team Trump lie because the truth is too uncomfortable to leave intact.
Whether Republicans like it or not, using the word “mandate” over and over won’t change the outcome or the voting numbers.
This piece updates our related previous reporting.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
