There Was No Popular Mandate for this Fascist Shock and Awe Campaign

He Didn't Even Win --- Voter Suppression Did

As the Revcoms Corps (RCC) for the Emancipation of Humanity puts it in its recent call for a Week of Action culminating in Nationwide Protests on Saturday, February 1, we are now in a state of “Emergency.” The fascist leader Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump:

“has unleashed a hailstorm of fascist shock and awe, [issuing] executive order after executive order to restructure society, ethnically cleanse non-white immigrants, erase trans people, seize territories, accelerated environmental destruction and more – all this enforced by measures aimed at silencing and punishing dissent within government and private institutions while pardoning and backing the hardened January 6 shock troops to intimidate and terrorize those who would resist.”

Herr Trump’s policy Blitzkrieg now includes a thoroughly unconstitutional freeze on Congressionally mandated federal grants, an action that has sparked mass confusion, fear, and dismay across the country.

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Again and again during her nationally televised press conference yesterday, the orange-sprayed fascist leader’s Orwellian press secretary Karoline Leavitt repeatedly claimed that this madness reflects the democratically determined and expressed will of “the American people” as demonstrated in Trump’s “sweeping election victory,” which has given him a “mandate” to undertake these actions.

The claim is absurdly false in 6 ways:

1. Tiny Popular Vote “Victory”

Trump’s 1.5 percent popular vote victory is one of the smallest ever in the history of US presidential elections — a small fraction of Lyndon B. Johnson’s 23 percent landslide victory in 1964. Trump failed to get a majority of the popular vote, at 49.7 percent, unlike George W. Bush in 2004 (50.3 percent), Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 (53 percent and 51 percent) and Joe Biden in 2020 (51 percent). While Trump won all seven swing states, his 312 Electoral College tally barely topped Biden’s (306) in 2020 — and pales before Obama’s (365) in 2008 and Ronald Reagan’s (525) in 1984.

2. “A Mere 0.15 Percent of Voters Nationwide”

We go from 1.5% to 0.15 when we look at the popular vote through the filter of the nation’s Electoral College, which effectively reduces US presidential contests to a small handful of contested states. As the election lawyer Mark Haider and the Princeton PhD candidate Aiden Calvelli recently demonstrated:

“Trump defeated Harris 312 to 226 in the Electoral College and won 2.3 million more popular votes. But had Harris won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — which Trump won by just 230,000 votes — then she would have secured exactly the 270 electoral votes needed for the win. A mere 0.15 percent of voters nationwide was the difference between Trump’s second term and Harris’s first.”

“Is that really a mandate?,” Haidar and Calvelli ask. “Under the Electoral College — where a handful of swing states are central to the outcome,” they note:

“a small number of fortunate, ‘determinative’ voters ultimately pick the president. Politicians will always have an incentive to overstate their margin of victory. Determinative Popular Vote now makes it harder to do so, as it puts into plain sight how close we actually were to a different election outcome…So yes, Trump clearly won the 2024 election. But it was no blowout — and he has no major mandate.”

3. Between a Third and a Quarter of the Nation’s Adults

Trump’s official vote total, more than 77 million, is equivalent to just 29 percent of the nation’s voting age population. Don’t let anyone tell you “half the country voted for Trump.”

4. Suppression Won

I’ve been waiting for the leading and venerable voter suppression expert Greg Palast to crunch the numbers on the 2024 election. His highly credible analysis went public four days ago. Palast credibly finds that Trump’ owes his 2024 “victory” to racist voter suppression. “Trump lost,” Palast reports:

“That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes. And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass ‘vigilante’ challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million….America deserves an answer to this question: Excluding a boost from Jim Crow vote suppression games, did Donald Trump win? From the shockingly huge numbers we’ve [discovered…] of provisional and mail-in ballots disqualified, the postcard purge operation, the vigilante challenges and so on, we can say, with reasonable certainty, Trump lost — that is, would have lost both the Electoral College and popular vote totals absent suppression.”

To see the specifics and methodology behind Palast’s conclusion, see his report here.

5. The Dismal Democrats

The Democratic Party was rightly labelled “the inauthentic opposition” by the astute Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin eighteen years ago. It is a cringing “neoliberal,” capitalist-imperialist party allegiant above all to corporate donors and investors. It surrendered whatever claim it had to be a “party of everyday people” and “the working class” long, long ago. No mass outpouring of popular support is required to defeat this depressing, dollar-drenched, and demobilized party and its transparently disingenuous and inauthentic candidates, who kept many decent people from voting last fall by backing a US-sponsored genocide in Gaza. The dismal Democratic Party is a Weimar organization that opens the door to Republi-fascist takeover and constantly conciliates the Reich-most major party. No mass mandate is or was required to defeat the dismal dollar Dems.

6. Voters Vote on Candidates, Not Detailed Policy Agendas

Trump is carrying out policies and taking actions worked up in great detail for him by Christian white nationalist neofascists linked to Project 2025, the elaborate, many-sided “far-right” policy agenda put together by an army of revanchist policy wonks under the umbrella of the fascist Heritage Foundations. Many of Trump’s recent actions – the funding freeze is a graphic example – cannot reasonably be said to have been on the presidential ballot last November. Some of his Shock and Awe campaign can be credibly said to have been on the ballot , of course — mass deportations, the January 6 pardons, and “drill baby drill,” for example — but the fact remains that the US quadrennial election spectacles are much more about candidates than they are about policies. More than 77 million Americans did not vote for Trump to freeze funding for Medicaid and veterans’ suicide prevention programs or to end FEMA, for example.

Some liberals and moderates tell me that we need to “just hunker down and ride through this storm” without rising up against it because, as Barack Obama and Joe Biden told them, this is the outcome of America’s supposed great democratic process. “You win some and you lose some,” the argument goes, “and when you lose you get back up and try again in the next election. Trump is our president now. The American people have spoken. Better luck next time. That’s democracy!”

What democracy? Those who are advance-surrendering to this unfolding fascist nightmare on the grounds that this is the sorry but “legitimate outcome” of “American democracy” as demonstrated in the 2024 elections need to take a closer look at how the “democratic” US political system works.

That system is far from a “democracy,” as I have shown with no special claim to originality in numerous books, essays, and talks.[1] And this is true whichever of the two dominant capitalist-imperialist parties holds down the US presidency.

That aside, the claim that Trump’s unfolding fascist Blitzkrieg reflects the democratic will of the people must be thoroughly rejected.

Rise Up!

If you are in or near Chicago, please come to hear me and others speak at an RCC-called rally against Trumpism-fascism at Federal Plaza in Chicago this Saturday at 2pm. The RCC is 100% correct to say:

“This is FASCISM. IT MUST BE STOPPED BEFORE IT IS CONSOLIDATED.

We call on all decent people to act boldly this week to say MO! and to call forward others in growing nonviolent resistance that doesn’t stop until this fascism is defeated.

Silence is COMPLICITY.

Standing up against individual attacks – against immigrants, trans people, and others – is righteous and necessary, but on its own it is NOT ENOUGH!

THE WHOLE TRUMP/MAGA FASCIST PROGRAM MUST BE DEFEATED BEFORE IT CONSOLIDATES!”

1. For starters. see Paul Street, They Rule: the 1% vs. Democracy (NY: Routledge. 2014); Paul Street, “The Real Constitutional Crisis: the Constitution,” CounterPunch, November 8, 2019, https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/11/08/the-real-constitutional-crisis-the-constitution/