Donald Trump does not have a "mandate" for any of this

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

53% : "Trump is back with a big agenda, a mandate -- and an axe to grind," noted a Politico headline.
53% : " Presidents of both parties, including Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, have since touted their electoral results to advance their agendas.
50% : (Trump has even hinted of his own mandate from Heaven, declaring, of his fortuitous turn away from the assassin's bullet, "I was saved by God to make America great again.") Mandates are typically invoked, Azari has observed, when a president is on the defensive or when he seeks to vastly expand his powers.
50% : Indeed, unlike Trump, FDR was reelected by a lot.
45% : Both apply to Trump -- whose approval ratings in reputable polls have never exceeded 49 percent -- but also, interestingly, to FDR, who, frustrated by a conservative Supreme Court striking down some of his New Deal policies, declared his 1936 re-election results a mandate "to save the Constitution from the Court and the Court from itself."
44% : In fact, Trump won less than half of the popular vote -- which, given the turnout, amounts to less than one-third of registered voters.
41% : Trump eked out a comeback win and kept himself out of prison -- no more, no less.
40% : And when you consider his Electoral College margin and House and Senate swings, "Trump didn't do super-well there, either," he added.
35% : Management and Budget officials justified their freeze on federal grants and loans based on "the will of the American people," who had given Trump a "mandate to increase the impact of every federal taxpayer dollar."
35% : Elon Musk, who has glommed onto Trump like a ravenous limpet, told White House reporters that "you couldn't ask for a stronger mandate" to eviscerate the administrative state: "The people voted for major government reform, and that's what people are going to get." Did they really?
33% : And this polling came before Trump unleashed Musk and his post-pubescent underlings on federal agencies like a swarm of diseased locusts.
29% : In his speech on Tuesday, Trump claimed -- absurdly -- that the November election "was a mandate like has not been seen in many decades."
29% : But Trump and his minions have taken the claim to outlandish extremes, as if winning an election can empower a president to defy democratic norms, federal law, and the Constitution itself.
20% : "My recent election," Trump remarked during his inaugural address, "is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and, indeed, their freedom.

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