1. It's still a smallish margin. "Mandate" used to be reserved for large margins. But any victory is, in some sense, a mandate--to govern as you would in the office.

2. There's no gradation in authority for a small margin of victory versus a large one. You're president or you're not, it's a pretty starkly binary choice.

3. Every elected official has the same "mandate" under our system as far as the elected office elected to goes. You win, there you go--you get the prize. But it's pretty hubristic for somebody to win and tell other elected officials that also won and also have a "mandate", "Hey, now you gotta do what I say!" That's nonsense. (Right up there with saying that the House's or Senate's job is to just do whatever the other two say, but that only gets said when somebody's polical party controls the presidency and one chamber of congress and wants the other to roll over and play dead. That's esp. true for the Senate, whose function is to provide a smoothing to the polical curve and it's sharp ups and downs that the House is prone to capturing and representing.)

More voted for people other than Trump than voted for him; but more voted for him than for Harris, so he wins. (In the absence of other candidates, maybe things would have been different and Harris would have won; or maybe in a two-way race Trump would have run a majority and not a plurality.)

Less than 4 years until a redo of sorts.

Pounding the fact that more voted against him will help him to disintegrate. More time he spends on that,.less time he has to destroy the nation.

Yes, I know the fact but that is not the objective.

trump and company are claiming a landslide and a mandate. The numbers do not support this

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

It took him 3 elections to win the popular vote. In his narcissistic, sociopathic mind, that's a mandate.