For those who voted for him I understand the people who are happy about what's happening. Those who claim they didn't "vote for this": they don't deserve to have a vote. The writing was on the wall in clear script.
You had to be genuinely gullible to vote for Trump this time, but that wasn't the case in 2016. I'm thinking of the blue-collar union members who voted for the Trump '24 ticket, for example, bitching to everybody who would listen about the price of eggs under Biden. In 2014 they would have been dragging down the Democrats' collective IQ, and now they've switched sides. Yet I wouldn't be surprised if many of them are still registered Democrats.
It seems like he's mostly doing what his coalition was hoping he would do? Certainly to a greater degree than in 2016. I have not seen any credible indications of post-election regret from his coalition.
They believed that things were bad and that Trump would make them better rather than worse. If that's not gullibility, I don't know what is.
His voters will ultimately be among his greatest victims... but he'll blame Biden for whatever goes wrong, and they'll lap it up like a dog with a dish of antifreeze, just like they always do.
It's a far stretch to say that this is what the majority of his voters wanted. Certainly many Republican voters have seemed very upset about this stupid blitzkrieg dismantling of core services.
But that's not what's being discussed in this subthread. The media portray Trump as having a popular vote mandate. That's not true
• 77,302,580 voted for this administration (49.8%)
• 77,935,722 voted against this administration (50.2%)
If you want to allege election fraud, don't beat around the bush.
That said, I do agree with the broader point that a narrow victory shouldn't give full control of the complete (federal) government, especially considering how they're going about things. But fixing that requires serious changes to the democratic system and good luck with that.
the United States of America's electoral system.
The Heath Robinson contraption in the US is hardly synonomous with Democracy, at best it's the oldest, creakiest example of a modern democracy.
For example because it’s not only president on the ballot. While I don’t think these results are perfectly representative of the support/opposition (for the reasons you describe) they are still representative.
What really matters is Trump v Harris, and Trump won that both in the electoral college and in the popular vote.
He arguably won a popular vote. That's barely a pop;lar vote mandate.
With what, a compass? This is an absurd statement, I bet they weren't wearing clothes manufactured in America, or using a phone that was built domestically.
The easiest way to fatigue a nation of nationalists is to let the world move on. The Axis forces might have been tired of globalism, but the globalists sure as hell weren't.
You're not wrong. However the portrayal of a mandate is a bit of a media fiction. He didn't have notably more votes than any other recent president.