I think the thing that worries me the most about Republicans — not just the voters, but apparently the politicians as well — is how convinced they are of the fallacy that Trump has some kind of mandate from the 2024 election.
The fact is, in terms of the electoral college, Trump won by one of the narrowest margins in the last hundred years. And when the counting of the popular vote was done, he didn’t even reach fifty percent of the total vote. The popular vote is the real indicator of a mandate, in fact, and given that only 156 million people voted in 2024, while 262 million people are eligible, even if he HAD gotten “half” of the popular vote, it would still be less than thirty percent of voting-age Americans.
It actually looks more than anything else like Americans just wanted to get the last election over with.
We’ve seen what the results of that have been, even after less than a week since the inauguration. Gas prices are up, egg prices are up, mass deportations have begun, and Trump is already threatening countries around the world in the name of this fictional “mandate” he believes he has.
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We know his voters believe it; their attitudes have only worsened since their guy won. They are more sarcastic and cruel than ever, death threats are up across the country, and they’re just not acting like people who just got what they wanted, other than the gloating.
But now we’re finding out that some Republican members of Congress really are that stupid, too. Or one of them, anyway.
Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee, in addition to making me embarrassed to be an Andrew, apparently thinks Trump won SO big that it means America wants him to run again in 2028, so he can, I don’t know, break the record again for oldest president ever, a record he’ll already hold by the end of this term.
In case that didn’t give you enough of a laugh, Ogles actually said it was so that he “can sustain the bold leadership our nation so desperately needs.” I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t mind some of whatever Andy Ogles is smoking. Neither “bold” nor “leadership” applies to Donald Trump, and certainly not together or in that order.
Presumably, Ogles’s proposed amendment would supersede the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, especially given that the text of the proposed amendment is so close to the original. Andy’s would read as follows:
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than three times, nor be elected to any additional term after being elected to two consecutive terms, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.
Subtract one from every number mentioned in that amendment, and you have the exact verbiage of the one that currently limits presidents to two terms only.
Trump had previously joked (directly to House Republicans before they held their internal leadership elections) “I suspect I won’t be running again, unless you do something,” Trump said a week after he won in November. “Unless you say, ‘He’s so good, we have to just figure it out.’”
Although Republicans after the meetings said that they’d all laughed at Trump’s terribly funny joke, apparently Rep. Ogles took it very seriously. In a statement, Ogles seemed not to be joking in any way:
“President Trump’s decisive leadership stands in stark contrast to the chaos, suffering, and economic decline Americans have endured over the past four years,” he said on Thursday. “He has proven himself to be the only figure in modern history capable of reversing our nation’s decay and restoring America to greatness, and he must be given the time necessary to accomplish that goal.”
The cognitive dissonance required to not only think that America was on the wrong track when Biden left office, after he cut inflation drastically following the mini-recession caused by the pandemic, sustained job growth every single month of his presidency, and bailed out an economy that was on life support after Trump’s disastrous first term, but also think that TRUMP is the answer to the problems we don’t have, is absolutely staggering.
“In just a few short days, President Trump has already taken action to undo the catastrophic policies of the Biden Administration and put the United States back on the path to strength and prosperity,” Ogles said in his Thursday statement.
If by that he means immediately mandating that the federal government stop acknowledging genders, sending out his ICE thugs to round up everyone brown in a workplace, school, hospital, or church, and trying to undo both the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, then yeah, I suppose we’ve been pretty “prosperous” with Trump’s actions so far.
This post was originally published on here
