Upon learning that he had won a clear election victory, Donald Trump responded, as is his custom, with a transparent lie. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” he gloated.

Reporters did not bother pointing out that there is no sense in which this claim lies anywhere within the range of plausibility. When you’re talking about historical precedent, impressive mandates that come to mind are Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and Richard Nixon in 1972, all of whom won by more than 20 percentage points. Polarization has made victories on this scale apparently impossible, but even in recent years, Bill Clinton’s victories (five and then eight points) and Barack Obama’s (seven, four) dwarf Trump’s.

At the moment, Trump is leading the national vote by around three points. California’s agonizingly slow vote-counting process traditionally ensures that the Democratic candidates gain vote share in the weeks after the election. Even at its current level, finding a mandate larger than Trump’s requires you to go back no further than four years, when Joe Biden trounced him by four and a half points, causing Trump to famously reject the outcome.

Why bother with this particular Trump lie, which hardly stands out in his lifetime of pathological dishonesty? Because Trump’s supporters are leveraging the shock of his victory to discredit the........

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