Transition 2025: Did Trump Win an “Unprecedented and Powerful Mandate”?

Donald Trump declared on Election Night, as votes were still being counted, that “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” Many media outlet echoed his claim by describing his victory as a “landslide,” “resounding,” and “sweeping.” But was it? 

To answer that question, consider how the winning candidate performed in three recent presidential elections. Candidate A won 52.9 percent of the popular vote, notched 365 electoral votes, and saw his party take control of Congress by picking up eight Senate seats and twenty-one House seats. Candidate B won 51.3 percent of the popular vote, notched 306 electoral votes, and saw his party take control of Congress by picking up three Senate seats while losing thirteen House seats. Candidate C won 49.8 percent of the popular vote, notched 312 electoral votes, and saw his party take control of Congress by picking up four Senate seats while losing one House seat. 

Those numbers suggest two possible conclusions. One is that Candidate A had the most impressive victory. The other is that none of the three candidates received a decisive mandate from the voters.  

Candidate A is Barack Obama in 2008. Candidate B is Joe Biden in 2020. Candidate C is Trump in 2024. 

Trump’s victory certainly pales in comparison to the landslide presidential victories of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 (60.8 percent of the popular vote and 523 electoral votes), Lyndon Johnson in 1964 (61.1 percent and 486), Richard Nixon in 1972 (60.7 percent and 520), or Ronald Reagan in 1984 (58.8 percent and 525).  

Indeed, by historical standards Trump’s victory is unimpressive. Consider the following: His margin of victory in the popular vote—which will be at most 1.6 percentage points when all the votes are counted—is the fifth smallest of the thirty-two presidential races held since 1900. More people in 2024 voted for a candidate not named Trump than did. A shift of roughly 235,000 votes in the right combination in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin would have elected Harris. And while Trump increased his vote total by 2.7 million in 2024 compared to 2020, he still fell more than four million short of the number that Biden won four years ago. 

That Trump exaggerated his victory is no sin. All winning candidates—not just those who habitually oversell their achievements—tout their triumphs. After all, election mandates are what you make of them.  

Trump’s cabinet picks suggest that he will govern as if his performance matched those of FDR, LBJ, Nixon, and Reagan. Perhaps he will succeed in solving America’s problems as he has vowed, thereby earning more freedom to enact his ambitious agenda.  

The Obama and Biden presidencies, however, suggest that Trump’s mandate is not as powerful as he thinks. Both Democrats began their presidencies with the political winds at their back. Yet, their decisions in office met opposition and their popularity steadily fell. Both then saw their party lose control of the House for the second half of their term, derailing their policy agendas.  

Much the same could happen to Trump, perhaps even more quickly. He seems intent on changing almost everything about the U.S. government. But disruptions exact a political price that fellow Republicans may not be willing to pay. Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration to be attorney general in the face of likely Senate opposition offers an early case in point.  

Beyond that, Trump won primarily because the election was a referendum on the Biden-Harris administration—a framing that the Trump campaign team worked hard to establish. Voters did not necessarily embrace Trump or his policy agenda, which left most details to the imagination. Election exit polls found that he had a favorability rating of just 48 percent. Forty-four percent of voters had a very unfavorable view, suggesting that he has a limited political upside.  

Trump is also inheriting a robust economy, even if many voters think otherwise. That economic success is easier to derail than it is to sustain. Trump’s plans for mass deportations, tariffs, and massive deficit spending could send the economy into reverse. Election 2024 showed that American politics has at least one iron law: Voters punish the governing party when they believe the economy is faltering. 

Finally, Trump faces one other looming liability: He is a lame duck. While he towers over American politics for now, Election 2028 will eventually exert its gravitational pull. Trump cannot run for a third term. (And no, the Twenty-Second Amendment will not be repealed.) Leading Republicans at some point will worry less about how to please Trump and more about how to advance their own presidential ambitions.  

None of this is to say that Trump’s second term will be inconsequential. Far from it. He can and likely will change U.S. policy in profound and perhaps irreversible ways. But the real lesson of Election 2024 is that America remains deeply divided politically even as it produced a clear winner. So rather than ushering in a new era in American politics, the political winds that now favor Trump could easily turn against him.  

The Vote 

Seventeen days after Election Day, votes continue to be counted in some races—and in a few cases, recounted. As of this morning, three House races have yet to be called. Two of those races are in California, the other is in Iowa. The margins in all three races are less than a thousand votes. If the candidates currently leading each race win, Republicans will have 221 seats in the new House and Democrats 214. 

All the Senate races have now been settled. Last night, Pennsylvania’s incumbent Democratic Senator Bob Casey conceded his race to Republican challenger Dave McCormick. The race had been called for McCormick two weeks ago with thousands of votes still to be counted. Casey hoped, however, that in a race in which he trailed by less than 17,000 votes out of the nearly 6.8 million cast, that he might pull out a miraculous, come-from-behind victory. Pennsylvania began an automatic vote recount earlier this week, but Casey ultimately acknowledged that the recount would likely change only a few hundred votes.  

What Trump Is Saying 

Trump said little in public this week about foreign policy. He did use a Truth Social post to confirm that he plans to declare a national emergency over illegal immigration and use the U.S. military to implement his plans for mass deportations. 

Trump also used his announcement of Chris Wright to be secretary of energy to declare that he plans to “drive U.S. Energy Dominance, which will drive down inflation, win the A.I. arms race with China (and others), and expand American Diplomatic Power to end Wars all across the World.” The last few words hardly sound like isolationism. 

What the Biden Administration Is Doing 

Biden has reversed course in recent weeks on several long-standing aspects of his policy toward Ukraine. Two weeks ago, he agreed to allow U.S. military contractors to operate in Ukraine. This week he agreed to send anti-personnel mines to the country, and perhaps more importantly, authorized Kyiv to use U.S.-supplied long-range missiles against targets in Russia. The Biden administration argued that the changing military situation on the ground necessitated the changes in what had been longstanding policy. Trump so far has said nothing about these moves. However, several of his allies, including his son Donald Trump Jr., accused Biden of trying to box in his successor at the risk of starting “World War III.” 

Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Lima, Peru, on the margins of the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. The two leaders called for cooperation on critical issues like artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons. They did not, however, strike any significant agreements. Xi did say that he is “ready to work with the next U.S. administration” and urged the United States to make a “wise choice and keep relations stable.”  

The Biden administration vetoed a UN Security Council resolution this week calling for a ceasefire in Gaza because the resolution failed to link the ceasefire to the release of hostages that Hamas holds. The administration also sent a special envoy to Beirut to try to negotiate a ceasefire in southern Lebanon and sanctioned an Israeli company that the State Department called “the largest organization involved in settlement and illegal outpost development in the West Bank.” 

Trump’s Appointments 

Trump named Matthew Whitaker to be the U.S. ambassador to NATO. He served as acting attorney general in the first Trump administration and was rumored to be a candidate for that position in the second Trump administration. Like many of the people Trump has named to his national security team, Whitaker brings no significant foreign-policy experience to the job. A lawyer by trade, he has worked primarily on domestic law enforcement matters.  

Trump named former Republican Representative Pete Hoekstra of Michigan to be ambassador to Canada. Hoekstra does have significant foreign-policy experience. Besides serving in the U.S. House for eighteen years, including three years as chair the House Intelligence Committee, he was U.S. ambassador to The Netherlands, his native country, during the first Trump administration.  

What the Pundits Are Writing  

The Washington Post reported that Trump continues to ignore the traditional transition process. Among other things, “Trump has yet to collaborate with the General Services Administration, which is tasked with the complex work of handing over control of hundreds of agencies, because he has not turned in required pledges to follow ethics rules. His transition teams have yet to set foot inside a single federal office.” 

Derek Grossman argued in Foreign Policy that Trump might give China a run for its money in southeast Asia. In Grossman’s view, the region will applaud “Trump’s likely deprioritizing of promoting values—such as democracy and human rights—abroad in favor of a more transactional approach that strictly aims at achieving U.S. national interests, especially among authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes that comprise most Southeast Asian states. Overall, Trump’s likely policies could put the United States in a better position to compete long-term against China in the region.” 

Ana Swanson and Edward Wong asked in the New York Times whether Trump shares the hawkish assessment that his foreign-policy team has of China. They suggest perhaps not: “When it comes to China, Mr. Trump is more transactional than ideological, willing to threaten or impose punishing tariffs to try to land deals that he says will benefit the United States. He has rarely expressed support for human rights and talks of autocrats, including Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in glowing terms. And current close advisers of his, notably Elon Musk, the tycoon who owns Tesla, have important business interests in China.” 

Ray Dalio, the founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, argued in Time Magazine that Trump will shake up the world order. In Dalio’s view, Trump will bring about “the end of an era led by the United States, in which countries tried to work out together how to be with each other through multinational organizations with guiding principles and rules, and into a more self-interested, law-of-the-jungle-type order with the United States being one of the two biggest players and China the other— and the fight being largely the classic one of capitalism versus communism (in their contemporary versions).” 

The AP’s Joshua Goodman wrote that Marco Rubio will likely reshape U.S. policy toward Latin America should the Senate confirm him as secretary of state. In Goodman’s view, Rubio “is likely to end the neglect” of the region. “But Rubio’s reputation as a national security hawk, embrace of Trump’s plan for mass deportation of migrants and knack for polarizing rhetoric is likely to alienate even some U.S. allies in the region unwilling to fall in line with the incoming president’s America First foreign policy.” Readers with long memories might recall that several recent U.S. administrations, including the Biden administration, came to office pledging to make Latin American a priority and then failed to do so.  

Politico’s Adam Cancyrn assessed the Biden administration’s efforts to institutionalize its foreign policy accomplishments. Cancyrn summarized the questionable effectiveness of that strategy with a quote from Ivo Daalder, the former U.S. ambassador to NATO: “There just isn’t anything Biden can do today that isn’t reversible in ten weeks.” 

My colleague Edward Alden reviewed Trump’s plans to deport millions of people living in the United States illegally. Ted notes that Trump did not match his harsh words on migration during his first term with equivalent actions; he actually ordered fewer deportations than Obama did during his first term. But if Trump does make good on his current promises, Ted argues that “it will reshape migration for a generation or longer—not just in the United States but in much of the world.” 

The Election Certification Schedule 

The deadline for governors to submit their state’s certificate of ascertainment, which certifies the results of the presidential election in their state and lists their state’s slate of electors, is in nineteen days (December 11).  

Electors meet in each state and the District of Columbia to cast their votes for president and vice president in twenty-five days (December 17). 

The 119th U.S. Congress is sworn into office in forty-two days (January 3) 

The U.S. Congress certifies the results of the 2024 presidential election in forty-five days (January 6). 

Inauguration Day is in fifty-nine days (January 20, 2025) 

Oscar Berry assisted in the preparation of this post. Transition 2025 will be on hiatus for the Thanksgiving break and will return in two weeks.