The column that has fun with the smaller mistakes and missteps of Australia’s mainstream mediocre; that pays homage to those sweet little fishes that individually don’t amount to a full meal but collectively can cause a tummy upset over the overall state of the once great and noble craft of journalism in this country.

We’re talking about the nasty Nazi-era propaganda expert Joseph Goebbels’ theory that if you tell a lie long enough it becomes the truth.

To prove this point, let’s hear from Nine News Queensland’s regular weekend news reader Paul Taylor who on Sunday night introduced a yarn on widespread US rallies against Donald Trump’s tariffs: “Just months after being voted back into the White House in a landslide …”.”

And who has repeated the landslide lie ad nauseam since last November’s presidential election? Donald Trump, of course. And the right-wing media (is that a tautology?) His win was ‘uge; the biggest ever. And a fair enough call, too, from Trump who has repeatedly lied for four years that he really won the 2020 campaign. Yes, the one he has relentlessly lied about: that it was rigged by the Democrats.

For the interest of whoever fed Taylor the bullshit landslide line, here are just some extracts of stuff we found online about last year’s race. It’s rather long, so please stop reading once you’re convinced feeding poor Paul the landslide line was a bullshit thing to do. On second thoughts, maybe Paul could read this too. He might then be able to shout out “bullshit!” during his pre-bulletin read-through.

***

In 2024, we have a new post-election lie from the Republican party. Trump didn’t just win, they say, but he won big. He won a landslide. He won an historic mandate for his “Maga” agenda.

And it was Trump himself, of course, on election night, who was the first to push this grandiose and self-serving falsehood, calling his win “a political victory that our country has never seen before” and claiming “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate”.

Republican politicians, masters of message discipline, quickly followed suit. The representative Elise Stefanik called his win a “historic landslide” while the senator John Barrasso called Trump’s a “huge landslide”. “On November 5 voters decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change, and they deserve to get it,” wrote the “Doge” co-heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in the Wall Street Journal on 20 November.

None of this is true. Yes, Trump won the popular vote and the electoral college. Yes, Republicans won the Senate and the House. But, contrary to both Republican talking points and breathless headlines and hot takes from leading media outlets (“resounding”, “rout”, “runaway win”), there was really nothing at all historic or huge about the margin of victory.

Repeat after me: there was no “landslide”. There was no “blowout”. There was no “sweeping” mandate given to Trump by the electorate. The numbers don’t lie.

First, consider the popular vote. Yes, Trump became the first Republican for two decades to win the popular vote. However, per results from CNN, the Cook Political Report, and the New York Times, he did not win a majority of the vote. Barack Obama did in both 2008 and 2012. Joe Biden did in 2020. But Donald Trump failed to do so in 2024.

And the former president’s margin of victory over Harris is a miniscule 1.6 percentage points, “smaller than that of every winning president since 1888 other than two: John F Kennedy in 1960 and Richard M Nixon in 1968”, as an analysis in the New York Times noted last month. In fact, in the 55 presidential elections in which the popular vote winner became president, 49 of them were won with a margin bigger than Trump’s in 2024.

We actually know what a landslide in the popular vote looks like: the Democrat Lyndon Johnson defeated the Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 by an enormous margin of 22.6 percentage points!

Second, consider the electoral college. Trump won 312 votes, which is 42 more than is needed to secure victory in the electoral college. But it’s still far fewer than Bill Clinton won in 1992 (370) and 1996 (379) and far fewer than Barack Obama won in 2008 (365) and 2012 (332). And it is pretty similar to what Trump himself won in 2016 (304) and what Biden won in 2020 (306). Trump’s margin of victory in the electoral college ranks 44 out of the 60 presidential elections in American history.

(Read enough, yet?)

We actually know what a landslide win in the electoral college looks like: the Republican Ronald Reagan won re-election with a whopping 525 electoral college votes in 1984!

By the way, did you know that Trump won the crucial blue wall states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – by 231,000 votes? So if just 116,000 voters across those three swing states – or 0.7% of the total – had switched from Trump to Harris, it is the vice-president who would have won the electoral college … and the presidency!

Third, consider the so-called “coattails” effect, where a presidential candidate’s massive margin of victory also boosts their party’s numbers in Congress. In 2024, Republicans flipped the Senate and held onto the House but Trump still ended up having “limited coattails”, to quote from the New York Times analysis. Of the five battleground states (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) which held Senate races in November, the Republican candidate triumphed in only one of them (David McCormick in Pennsylvania, by a narrow 16,000 votes). Democrats held on to the other four.

(Satisfied now?)

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