Hume warns Trump team not to treat win as mandate

Fox News’s chief political analyst, Brit Hume, cautioned President-elect Trump not to proceed in his second term with the mindset that the American people elected him in a landslide and gave him a mandate to push through partisan policies.

“This was a clear and convincing win for Mr. Trump, to be sure, and — particularly when you think of all the stuff that had been thrown at him as he tried to be elected again — it's impressive,” Hume said Monday on “Special Report” with Bret Baier.

“But whether it is a landslide producing a mandate is another matter,” he added.

Hume noted that while “we don’t elect people based on the popular vote,” Trump, by some updated counts, has dropped below 50 percent, and the popular vote “is one way to measure whether somebody has won a landslide.”

Another way, Hume said, is to count the number of states the candidate won. Trump won 30 in 2024, falling short of the near-sweep pulled off decades ago by former Presidents Reagan, Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, for example.

“Those were true landslides, allowing a candidate or elected president to claim a mandate,” Hume said.

Hume pointed to President Biden’s early years in the White House as a warning sign, noting Democrats similarly had control at the time of the White House, Senate and House, and Biden tried to push through some major pieces of legislation.

"Joe Biden won a narrow victory — convincing, perhaps, but narrow — in 2020, and once he got control of the Senate and had control of both houses, he started thinking that he was going to be the new FDR, and was going to pass all kinds of great social legislation, some of the results of which were an outbreak of inflation, from which his candidacy and his campaign never recovered,” Hume said. “So, you have to be careful about these things. Mandates, real mandates, are rare, and landslides are perhaps even rarer.”

“My thought about this is: The president would be wise to ignore the talk from his supporters about what an enormous mandate he has and what a great landslide he won, because thinking that can lead to trouble,” Hume added.

Hume said Trump following through with his promise of mass deportation would be an appropriate reading of Trump’s mandate, given how clear the president-elect was on his goal.

“Particularly on the deportation of illegal migrants,” Hume said, “he does, I think it's fair to say, have an authority to do that, and the voters understood that that's one of the things he said he was going to do, and he never back away from it.”

“If he moves ahead with that, I don't think it’s an overreading of his authority, or his mandate,” Hume added.