Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States at noon on Monday, Jan. 20, in Washington D.C.
When asked how this moment compares historically to other presidential administrations on the eve of the inauguration, UCLA public policy and political science expert Mark Peterson comments on Republicans controlling both houses of Congress and Trump’s claim of a “massive landslide victory” and “historic mandate” to reshape policy with respect to taxation, federal social spending, immigration, energy production, family values, defense and other areas.
“There certainly have been times in modern American history when following major electoral victories, presidents and their parties with simultaneous ‘control’ of Congress have been able to orchestrate, through statute and executive action, either comparably profound redirections or major expansions of the state and public policy commitments.”
“Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal in the 1930s and Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society in the 1960s immediately come to mind on the Democratic side of the ledger. Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1980s moved the policy needle on some issues significantly in the other direction, although he was more constrained by the Democratic House majority. All had in common massive electoral college landslides, popular vote majorities with double-digit margins over the opposition party, and, except for Reagan, supermajorities in the House and Senate.”
“Trump won only a plurality of the popular vote, with one of the slimmest margins in history and among the smallest electoral college wins, while the GOP’s majority in the House is among the thinnest in the past century and in the Senate well short of breaking a filibuster — all far short, too, of what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama experienced when they entered office.
“Perhaps the only thing empirically historic about the Trump and Republican win is the gap between the mandate claims and the actual evidence.”
Peterson is a UCLA professor of public policy, political science, health policy and management, and law and a senior fellow at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.