On Election Day, most of us — prior to seeing the eventual outcome — assumed that at some point Donald Trump would declare victory, even if he hadn’t won. We were all bracing ourselves for the possibility of something happening again that looked like January 6, 2021.

But when Trump unexpectedly won, the premature declaration became something different. Now Trump didn’t need to falsely declare victory, he needed it to be the biggest victory of all time. What can I say? The man deals exclusively in superlatives.

For Trump, something is either “the greatest of all time” or it’s “the worst in history,” but at the very least it’s always “the biggest you’ve ever seen.”

So of course the fact that he won the popular vote in addition to the electoral college must mean his win was peerless. Unequaled. Nobody has ever done anything like that before. Right?

That was the narrative, in fact, until people, um, kept counting the votes. It hasn’t been enough to overturn the election or anything, but the results are mostly in now, and they show that not only did Trump get less than 50% of the popular vote, but the margin between his number and Kamala’s number is smaller than the margin of the 2016 popular vote, which Hillary Clinton won. Even if she didn’t win the electoral college, the popular vote favored her by half a percent higher than Trump was over Harris.

Now that the media is reporting it, we’re seeing shades of Sean Spicer covering Trump’s 2017 inauguration as his new press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, rails against the news for telling the truth.

🚨New Fake News Narrative Alert!

Here are the ridiculous headlines from @politico and @nytimes this morning

The fake news is trying to minimize President Trump’s massive and historic victory to try to delegitimize his mandate before he even takes the Oath of Office again pic.twitter.com/ywHWFb9MxT

— Karoline Leavitt (@karolineleavitt) November 22, 2024

She’s even using the old standby claim of “fake news.” But the numbers are real, and math isn’t fake.

We know the actual number of votes Trump got. We know the population of America. We know how many of them are registered voters. We know what percentage of those registered voters actually showed up to vote. It’s all math from there.

It turns out that just under 30% of Americans who are of voting age actually voted for Trump. If you’re interested in the math:

• 76,783,731 people voted for Trump
• 262,083,034 Americans were age 18 or older as of June 2023, the latest date we have information for
• Just because Trump got a plurality (not a majority) of voters does not mean he has a mandate, or that he’s even remotely popular among the 70%+ of voting-age citizens who didn’t vote for him

No, the fake news is coming from inside the house in this case. Trump told Fox News last week, “We had a great election in the U.S.… Amazing what happened, we had tremendous success. The most successful in over 100 years they say.”

I don’t know who “they” are, but you only have to go back to 2008 for a more successful victory in a presidential election. Obama won with 53 more electoral votes than Trump and a 7.2% gap between him and his opponent in the popular vote. THAT is a mandate. Trump’s popular vote margin, according to the New York Times, is about 1.6% over Harris, the third-SMALLEST margin in more than 100 years.

But Trump and his cohorts in Congress have to claim that everyone wants what Trump is selling. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung claimed in the Times that “President Trump won in dominating and historic fashion after the Democrats and the fake news media peddled outright lies and disinformation throughout the campaign.”

There was nothing dominating about it, and elections experts are actually calling for a recount in the swing states because the whole thing seems so weird, since the outcomes in the swing states are so out of line with polling and don’t coincide with the trending results of non-swing states.

They have to claim a mandate because you can’t come out and say “Well, I barely won. I guess that means everyone in America loves me and they all want to see me slash Medicare and Social Security so I can give that money to billionaires.”

When you have as massive an agenda as Trump does — Remember Project 2025? They’re admitting that was the plan all along now — you have to also have a massive mandate.

But no matter how hard he tries, he’s never going to have that mandate.