A True Mandate
Woman: Well ‘ow did you become king, then?
Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your King!
Dennis: Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
(Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1975)
In his inauguration speech on 20 January 2025, Trump (not for the first time) announced that he had been given a “mandate.” Just what does he mean, here? And what are we to take from that? What are we to do?
Unsurprisingly, “mandate” is quite an old word. It goes way back into Roman law. In Classical Latin, “mandātum” could mean a variety of things, including “instructions” or “imperial decree.” It could also mean “to hand over” “to assign,” or “to command.”
In more modern European Law, mandate came to mean: “A judicial or legal command from a superior to an inferior; any order, request, etc., issued by a legislative body or embodied in a legislative act. In early English law: a command of the king and his justices relating to a private suit” (OED). France and England both had monarchies, so a mandate was effectively an “imperial decree,” an “order” or “command.” It had nothing to do with the voice of the people.
The word then passed into Old French and Middle French and eventually to English. By the late 1700s, mandate meant “The commission to rule or to pursue stated policies conferred by electors on their elected representatives; support for a policy or measure of an elected party regarded as deriving from the preferences expressed by the votes of the electorate” (OED). In US Law, “mandate” was taken to mean: “a document conveying a decision of a court of appeal to an inferior court” (OED).
The Oxford English Dictionary notes that, between 1500 and 2010, the word mandate appears about 5 times per million words. The OED has scanned all published works archived in Google Books to come up with that number. Notably, the use of “mandate” doubled between 1970 and 2010. However, between 2017 and 2024, we saw an even sharper increase in the use of the word, to a height of 50 uses per million in 2021, and 17 uses per million in 2024. One might imagine that the spike in 2021 was related to the COVID pandemic.
US Presidents claiming a mandate for the presidency, or for particular actions, is nothing new. For example, in 1832 Andrew Jackson claimed a mandate for his destruction of the Second Bank of the US. Woodrow Wilson did not (as far as I know) use the word “mandate.” He did, however, argue that as a consequence of the election that he spoke for the whole nation. In that sense, he as evoking the notion of the consequences of an election as a mandate.
More recently, Jimmy Carter spoke of a mandate — even though his election victory, like that of Trump, was razor-thin. Even so, he argued that the election victory itself was a mandate — harkening back to the older meaning of the word. Following Carter, Reagan, too, claimed a mandate.
In Reagan’s case, though, something was different. He won by a very large margin. A landslide. And this really becomes to contemporary use of the word mandate: today, it is generally meant as an overwhelming victory, as an overwhelming demand. A large victory means that the consensus is strong. It means that a large portion of the population backs the candidate’s platform and agenda. It is a strong endorsement of the president’s actions.
But in Trump’s case, he lost the popular vote in 2016, and he lost outright in 2020. Now, with both the popular vote and the electoral college, he is claiming a mandate for his agenda.
In the historical sense of the word, he’s right. He has been given the charge to lead by the electorate. In the more contemporary sense of the word, he’s wrong. He does not have widespread support or a massive endorsement of his agenda. That IS, however, what he wants you to think.
Trump is playing on both senses of the meaning. He invokes the idea of a mandate to make us think that he has overwhelming support (or, he may well believe in his own mind that he DOES have that). He will repeat the claim of a mandate over and over. He knows that simply repeating a claim over and over makes it “true” in the minds of his followers.
He does not, however, have the overwhelming support of US citizens. On Nov. 5, 2024, the US population was 340,865,045 people. Of that, we have about 244,000,000 eligible voters. Of those, only 161,420,00 are registered to vote. In the 2024 election, 156,302,318 people voted. So, approximately 96% of registered voters voted, but only 64% of eligible voters. Further, Trump won just 49.9% of all votes cast.
In the contemporary sense of a landslide mandate, in the sense that Trump is trying to foster, he is far from there. He did not even win a majority of the votes cast, let alone of the eligible voters. He won a plurality of votes.
What to do, then? He will repeat his claim of a mandate often. The response is to repeat that he does NOT have a mandate just as often. Write letters to the editor; write your local, state, and federal representative; talk to your friends, family, and neighbors.
He does have mandate from his base. He does not have a mandate from the masses.
Ritch Calvin is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at SUNY Stony Brook. He is the author of Queering SF: Readings (Aqueduct), Feminist Epistemology and Feminist Science Fiction (Palgrave McMillan) and edited a collection of essays on Gilmore Girls (McFarland). His most recent book is Queering SF Comics: Readings (2024, Aqueduct Press).
