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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Americans across the political spectrum have continued to ask about the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections among the political elite. (Angela Weiss/AFP)
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.