“This is a moment like nobody’s ever seen before. Frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time. There’s never been anything like this in this country. America has given us a powerful and unprecedented mandate.”
Those were Donald Trump's words on election night.
He is wrong about the first part of that statement. His victory is not the greatest in U.S. history. In fact, past presidents outperformed Trump's victory several times in the past - Thomas Jefferson (1804), Abraham Lincoln (1864), Franklin Roosevelt (1936), Lyndon Johnson (1964), Richard Nixon (1972), and Ronald Reagan (1980 and 1984) all had much bigger victories. Those were blowout victories. Trump's was not.
But he is right about the last part of his statement. The voters did give him a mandate. It was a mandate from working Americans. It was a mandate to make their lives better by increasing wages and decreasing inflation.
In the last few decades, workers have been left behind. While the rich have done well - becoming the super-rich in many cases - workers have seen their wages stagnate and fall far behind inflation. They are struggling to make ends meet and desperate for someone to make things better for them.
Unfortunately, I don't think Trump realizes that is his true mandate.
Trump thinks he has a mandate to extend his tax cuts, which gave massive cuts to the rich and almost nothing to anyone else. The rich got 82% of those cuts, while the rest of Americans divided the remaining 18%. That will not make life better for workers.
Trump thinks he has a mandate to deport millions of immigrants. Those deportations will not help workers. The jobs they have are now (and always have been) open to citizens. The problem is citizens don't want, and would not be helped by those jobs becoming even more oped.
Trump thinks he has a mandate to stop his own criminal trials and use the Justice Department to go after his political opponents. That will not help workers.
Trump thinks he has a mandate to stop progress on climate change, and actually do away with the regulations already in place. That won't help workers. It would hurt the workers in the clean energy industries.
Trump thinks he has a mandate to make sure reproductive rights are not restored to women. That won't help workers. It will make sure women continue to die because doctors are afraid to give them reproductive health care.
Trump thinks he has a mandate to stop programs that help minority groups (nonwhites, LGBTQ people, etc.). That won't help workers. It will hurt the workers in those groups.
I understand the desperation of workers. They have been ignored for far too long. But they have placed their trust in a man who never worked a day in his life and doesn't understand the plight of workers. A man who doesn't care about workers or the mandate they gave him.
