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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

It's not what America wanted. It's what the felon-in-chief wants, but he doesn't represent most Americans.

That becomes harder to believe in light of the most recent electoral result where he won the popular vote. I do want to believe that he doesn't represent most Americans, however.

It seems clear that non-MAGA people who voted for Trump did so because they believed his BS promises to make the economy better and fast, and secondarily because of the immigration issue. Most of them didn't think Trump would actually do all of the horrible things he and others said he was going to do.

And even then, he only barely won the election. It was the slimmest margin since the 1800s.

Not at all clear. Are voters really that stupid? Seems more likely there are more evil people around us than we expected, and they knowingly voted for evil.

He won 49% of the votes cast. He did not get a majority, but a plurality. The turnout was ~64%, so he got ~30% of the possible votes. His main opponent got about ~28% of the possible votes.

He doesn't have the mandate he thinks he does, but he's a megalomaniac led by his nose ring by the psycopathic megalomaniacs behind Project 2025, which ~90% (more?) of Americans said that they didn't like when they saw it.

All speculation and the non voters said: I do not care

Sorry, but I don't think these percentages, turnouts, and other technicalities matter, at all.

This is how the American people has chosen to represent themselves. The American people created the system, and the Americans knew their own system. The system produced this guy.

Now, why does it matter which percentage did he get? He got enough, did not he? And obviously he does have the mandate, because he is able to do things his way.

There is precisely one way in which the will of the American people is measured. When we talk about "what America wants", it doesn't include the opinion of people who didn't show up in November. People who choose not to vote throw away their right to be included in the "what America wants" bucket. This shouldn't be a controversial statement.

Trump barely won the popular vote, so even ignoring the rest of the citizenry, it's a real stretch to say that he represents "the will of the people" in any significant way. At best, he represents "the will of half of the people who voted" -- and even that's a stretch, because a lot of the people who voted for him opposed his stance on most things.

I agree, but until you have large crowds doing a general strike, shutting major and minor cities, it's going to continue and observers abroad are going to conclude that the population is OK with it.

Stop. This is our president. This is our face to the world. By democratic vote. We can't weasel out of this. This IS who we are as a nation right now. Don't 'this isn't us' on HN. Do something in real life to change things so that this stops being us. But today, this is us. You and me.

Well, he won the popular vote.

It represents most Americans who voted.

I disagree entirely.

That's not even factually correct. He won less than 50% of the popular vote.

But isn't the voting system wrong then?

And yet, polling so far shows that 90+% of Trump voters are still fine with what he's been doing to the executive branch, and I expect most of those people don't particularly care about Ukraine or understand the nuances of diplomacy or soft power.

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