To the editor:

Call him Forty-five. Call him Forty-seven. As for me, I’ll call him Fifty-one.

That’s the percentage of the vote Donald Trump won the presidency by, the smallest number possible for a majority. Yet there are people calling it a mandate. But is it?

In 2020, Joe Biden had about 60 percent of the vote. That’s a mandate. Did Republicans give him carte blanche? No, rather they used the filibuster to block key parts of his agenda. In 2016, Hillary Clinton had 54 percent of the vote, and she didn’t even get to be president.

Trump won because of a handful of voters in three key states. He has no mandate. What he has is a constitution written 250 years ago by slaveholders who wanted to keep their human chattel so they crafted the Electoral College as a way to prevent the common man from having a real voice in running the country.

Even when it was written, Ben Franklin feared that one day the precarious document could potentially falter and fail, which it nearly did several times. This week, I fear it finally did.

We just re-elected a malignant narcissist with a grudge. We elected him knowing his hand-picked SCOTUS had already given him carte blanche to commit crimes for his own gain. Then, icing the cake, we gave him both houses of Congress.

The Founders thought they’d created a checks-and-balances system that would stand the test of time, and in three election cycles the tiniest possible majority of us tossed it out the window.

It’s not a question of “Will we rue the day?” The only question is how soon we’ll rue.

Forty-nine percent of us are ruing already, but others’ll begin on day one when he brags that he brokered peace in the Middle East, but what really happens is Bibi Netanyahu agrees to a cease fire on paper but actually moves from the Palestinian apartheid to something even worse.

Others will rue when Ukraine, a country he once tried to blackmail leading to his first impeachment, is handed to Russia, creating a staging ground for the takeover of Poland and eventual war in Europe.

Still others will rue when they lose their health care as Obamacare is overturned in favor of the “Concepts of a Plan” health care bill.

Ultimately, when the massive tariff implementation leads to runaway inflation and tax cuts to his cronies leads to a ballooning deficit and all labor protections are gone and the national abortion ban promised in Project 2025 is imposed and the round-up of brown people with accents is implemented and Trump succumbs to the syphilis that has clearly been eating away at his mind giving us President J.D. Vance, perhaps then the percentage of those ruing will breach 75.

When that basket of deplorables is finally in charge of every facet of your life, I’ll be there to say “I told you so.” Hopefully the press is still free enough to publish it, but I’m not hopeful.

J. David Core

Toronto