Paul Krugman Destroys Donald Trump's Claim to a Mandate

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Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:49 pm

In a series of tweets today, Paul Krugman laid waste to Donald Trump’s claim to a mandate, explaining that a margin of less than 1 percent would have been the difference and that it took a perfect storm of events to defeat Hillary Clinton:

“Judging from my mail, people still seem to have a hard time understanding both what happened in November and what causation means. First, Clinton won the popular vote solidly. No, you don’t get to exclude New York City or California from the total. But Trump won the electoral vote, with margins of <1 percent in PA, MI, WI. So a national 1 percent swing would have changed everything. In fact, it would have looked like a solid mandate for HRC: a bigger popular vote margin than Bush in 2004. So what cost that 1%? The answer is, there were multiple things that shouldn't have happened. Maybe HRC should have run a better campaign. But her campaign would have looked fine if the press hadn't decided on saturation coverage of the BS email "scandal" while underplaying Trump's cesspool of corruption. And even then she'd have had that 1% if Comey hadn't violated every rule 11 days out. So what "caused" the result? Bad question, since any one of these factors would have changed everything. It was a perfect storm. Or make that a perfect Stormfront. And yes, Putin may also have tipped the scale. Nothing in there says that Trump deserves our respect."

Donald Trump likes to claim that he won by a landslide, a lie repeated by everyone associated with the president-elect. In fact, this all begins to look a bit like that math Republicans do. Though he lost by 3 million votes Republicans like to claim that doesn’t matter because if you take California and New York City out of the equation, Trump won the popular vote.

As Krugman explains, you don’t get to remove either from the final tally. All votes count, and the margin in other states was so tiny that as he explains, even had one event fallen out differently, we would be looking at a vastly different future, one in which hope flowers rather than one in which terror destroys.

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Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen's Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.

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