In September, I wrote, “No matter who wins, the next president will declare that they have a ‘mandate’ to do something. And they will be wrong.”
I was wrong in one sense.
Now, I still think the idea of mandates are always conceptually flawed and often ridiculous. The only relevant constitutional mandate Donald Trump enjoys is the mandate to be sworn in as president.
Think about this way: Trump’s coalition together contains factions that disagree with one another on many things. Assume that self-described Republicans are Trump voters. According to the exit polls, about a third (29 percent) of voters who support legal abortion voted for Trump, while 91 percent of those who think it should be illegal voted for him. There are similar divides over support for Israel, mass deportation of immigrants and other issues. Heck, 12 percent of voters who think his views are “too extreme” nonetheless voted for him. Five percent of the people who would feel “concerned or scared” if he were elected still backed him at the polls.
In short, whatever Trump believes his mandate is, at least some of the people who voted for him will have different ideas. Save for dealing with inflation and righting the economy, there’s very little that he can do that won’t result in some people saying, “This isn’t what I voted for.” (Even if you believe in mandates, how big could Trump’s be given it’s tied as the 44th-best showing ever in the electoral college?)
None of this is unique to Trump. Presidential electoral coalitions always have internal contradictions. FDR had everyone from progressive Blacks and Jews to Dixiecrats and Klansmen in his column.
Many people seem to think that politics is what happens during elections. But politics never stops. Once elected, the venue for politics changes. Presidents believe, understandably, that they were elected to do what they campaigned on. The challenge is that Congress and state governments are full of people who won an election too. And they often have their own ideas about what their “mandate” is. Postelection politics is about dealing with that reality.
Which gets me to what I got wrong. Although voters generally may not have spoken with anything like one voice on various policies, Republican voters voted for Republicans who would be loyal to, and supportive, of Trump. In other words, whether it fits some political scientist’s definition of a mandate, Republican senators and representatives believe that they have a mandate to back Trump.
The jockeying to replace Mitch McConnell as majority leader in the next Senate makes this so clear, it’s not even subtext, it’s just text. The three Republican contenders, John Thune of South Dakota, John Cornyn of Texas, and Rick Scott of Florida, fell over each other to reassure Trump and everyone else that they will do everything possible to confirm Trump’s appointees with breakneck speed.
Thune, who won the job last week, said in a statement, “One thing is clear: We must act quickly and decisively to get the president’s cabinet and other nominees in place as soon as possible to start delivering on the mandate we’ve been sent to execute, and all options are on the table to make that happen, including recess appointments.”
Thune was playing catch-up to Scott, who’d already signaled that he’d be Trump’s loyal vassal in the Senate. This earned him the support of Elon Musk and other backers who want Trump to be as unrestrained as possible.
An honorable and serious man of institutionalist instincts, Thune is simply dealing with the political reality of today’s GOP. The argument that anyone inside the Republican Party should do anything other than “let Trump be Trump” is over, at least in public.
Given that only 43 percent of voters said Trump has the moral character to be president (16 percent of his own voters said he doesn’t), this could lead to some challenging political choices for the party.
Once again, a victorious party is sticking its head in the mandate trap. In the 21st century, Yuval Levin writes, presidents “win elections because their opponents were unpopular, and then — imagining the public has endorsed their party activists’ agenda — they use the power of their office to make themselves unpopular.” This is why the incumbent party lost for the third time in a row in 2024, a feat not seen since the 19th century.
Hence the irony of the mandate trap. In theory, Trump could solidify and build on his winning coalition, but that would require disappointing the people insisting he has a mandate to do whatever he wants. Which is why it’s unlikely to happen.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
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A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.