Title: Donald Trump & GOP Congress: 2016 Election Mandates | National Review
Headings: Does Donald Trump Have a Mandate?
Does Donald Trump Have a Mandate?
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Three Kinds of Presidential Mandates
The People’s House
The Senate of the Republic

Content: Is Trump the legitimately elected 45th president of the United States? Love him or hate him, he is. He won by the rules of the game, rules set forth in the Constitution 229 years ago and clearly understood by both sides entering the election. This entitles and obligates him to exercise the powers of the Executive Branch within their constitutional scope. The fact that Trump did not win the national popular vote is irrelevant to his executive mandate — and not all that unusual in our system of government, either. Depending on how you count it, we’ve had either four or five prior presidents who did not win the national popular vote, and while that was a modest initial political liability for those presidents, their later success stood or fell on what they did with the office if they were able to win the Electoral College cleanly. The first two, however, didn’t pull off clean wins in the Electoral College: John Quincy Adams in 1824 needed the House of Representatives to pick him as the president after there was no Electoral College majority, and it was the “corrupt bargain” struck with House Speaker Henry Clay — who threw his support to Adams and became Secretary of State — that gave Andrew Jackson the ammunition to hobble Adams’s administration and defeat him four years later. Rutherford B. Hayes lost a majority to Samuel Tilden, if you take at face value the vote counts in Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction states where the election was marred by widespread violence and intimidation. But a backroom deal seated Hayes’s electors and gave him the presidency in exchange for an end to Reconstruction.