Just How Sweeping Is MAGA’s Mandate?

On November 5^th, the American people gave Donald Trump one of the most resounding and consequential political mandates in generations. By the popular vote count, he won more in total than any – legitimate – presidential candidate in history, eclipsing by 3 million his own record-breaking 74 million votes from 2020. On the electoral college side, Donald Trump amassed more of such votes than any Republican president since George H.W. Bush, nearly forty years ago, who at that point was just one election removed from Ronald Reagan’s 49-state landslide and rode the momentum of his predecessor. By 2024’s standards, Donald Trump’s 2024 victory – both in terms of electoral and popular vote – was a landslide. Not only were the sheer numbers unexpectedly staggering – 312 electoral votes plus 77 million popular votes. But the context in which this victory came: multiple assassination attempts, countless phony charges and indictments, and a barrage of fake news hit jobs, makes the victory, in a word, miraculous.

Every single noteworthy institution, political and cultural, from Hollywood to the mainstream press to the Academy, was aligned against Donald Trump unlike any candidate in American history. It is clear, especially in the aftermath of the election, why precisely they were so aligned against Donald Trump: he and his movement represented the old American nation, the remaining vestiges of the one still beholden to constitutional government and self-rule. The countermovement, embodied by Kamala Harris, was the ideology of globalism, open-borders, and institutionalized Marxism made flesh. It represented everything that was opposed to what America long stood for: from its focus on wasteful overseas wars while ignoring the mounting problems at home (an affront to a longstanding and venerable policy of non-interventionism whose origins lay in George Washington’s Farewell Address), to its ravenously godless attacks on morality, biological sex, and the way technology can be manipulated to control and tyrannize a collective people. Thus, there was much at stake this election cycle. The only outstanding question really was how much of the old America still remained – how much did the American people recognize their ancestral duties to throw off the shackles of tyranny at the moment of greatest urgency. Blessedly, Americans, though late at the arrival, did indeed rise to the task.

For the first time in a generation, Republicans (at least nominally) have control of both chambers of Congress, plus the presidency, plus the Supreme Court – with an historic popular mandate to boot to help realize their agenda. That this popular mandate was almost certainty diminished by fraud and corruption, the result of Democratic Party machinery in big cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, that actively work each election cycle to erode the Republicans’ due share of the overall vote through unlawful vote grabbing and illegal ballot dumps, only serves to underscore just how significant the mandate was. Donald Trump won, not because he eradicated the systemic cheating that barred him from a second term four years ago, but despite that Herculean contingency. That he did so proverbially chained for weeks on end to multiple courtrooms, itself a heinous form of election interference, is yet further testimony of just how enormous the scope of the electoral mandate he was given.

Anyone who seeks to undercut the President’s victory by claiming this election was only about inflation, the Ukrainian war, or even the crisis at the border – grave as each of those problems are – is not seeing the full picture. This was not a mere election about politics, as that term has been conventionally understood, but a withering indictment of the regnant powers that be, their unconstitutional use and abuse of power, and the perniciously zealous ideologies of social justice wokeism they have inculcated throughout American institutions in recent decades. The demand among the body politic to drain the swamp is a fundamental expression of MAGA’s political doctrine, which is to restore republican government and democratic rule by the people’s will, over against the unelected bureaucrats and political elite that have brought our society to near ruin.

Globalism and social justice have been the one-two punch that, like an aggressive cancer, have almost completely eroded America’s once robust institutions and civic identity. As it turns out, Make America Healthy Again is not just a motto for rejuvenating public health, but can function as a formula for civic renewal. We need to root out the political cancer, which requires taking a sledgehammer to institutions like the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, and the myriad intelligence agencies, to return power back to their constitutionally authorized places: Congress, the individual states, and the Executive Branch under a unitary authority: namely, the President. The structural reforms needed for government run downstream of a seismic ideological shift that goes much deeper than institutional clean-up, with origins in society and our jurisprudence going back decades.

Basically, MAGA represents a complete rejection of modern liberalism, root and branch. The ideology’s pernicious fixation on equity and diversity, at the expense of quality and freedom has finally been renounced by the American people. The forces that have been working so vigilantly to bring down this country and make every American ashamed and embarrassed of his birthright and history, so much so that they hoodwinked millions to dismember monuments dedicated to great heroes, rename public buildings, overhaul the calendar and its sacred holidays and traditions, and engage in pitiful episodes of ritualistic self-loathing and denounce Christian morality, have been utterly rejected. The invidious superstitions that unify the cult of HR-managers, social justice activists, and pronoun policers have been dealt a major blow, hopefully terminal, and should never be permitted to go anywhere near the levers of power again.

The next four years of course will be a continuation of this generational tug-of-war; but the war itself is worthy and necessary, for the ideological forces that guided the Left, and their political successes through Obama, Biden, the Mueller investigation, Jack Smith, the January 6th Committee, and the various forms of persecution against Donald Trump, his allies, and his supporters over years and years, must be defeated once and for all. They have demonstrated, by so flagrantly and brazenly weaponizing justice against Donald Trump and the January 6^th demonstrators, for example, that their ideology is incompatible with free government and justice, as that term has long been understood under the Constitution. In America, you do not prosecute your political enemies, let alone innocent civilians who exercise their God-given rights that also happen to be enshrined, protected, and guaranteed by the law of the land. The movement that does engage in such feverish zealotry has abdicated forever its claim to power.

Donald Trump’s mandate hence runs much deeper than another mere political victory. This is not politics or business as usual. This is a wakeup call by the American people to destroy what Elon Musk calls the “Woke Mind Virus” once and for all: to obliterate it from our institutions and from public life in general and put this country on sound footing again to reclaim the mantle of its hallowed inheritance of a once great and mighty people.

Paul Ingrassia is a Constitutional Scholar; Communications Director of the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow, and is on the Board of Advisors of the New York Young Republican Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted on Truth Social by President Trump. Follow him on X @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, Instagram, and Rumble.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.