All newly elected presidents claim a mandate to lead the country in whatever direction they want, and in typical Donald Trump fashion, he and his team have claimed a huge one.

"We truly do believe that our president-elect has secured a mandate for leadership," Vice President-elect Mike Pence told a group of wealthy donors last week at a Heritage Foundation dinner in Trump's new hotel in Washington, D.C. "This is a historic victory." Late last month, Kellyanne Conway, Trump's senior adviser and former campaign manager, tweeted a similar conceit about Trump's Electoral College tally: "306. Landslide. Blowout. Historic." On Sunday, Trump claimed on Fox News that he won a "massive landslide victory, as you know, in the Electoral College."

These claims should be taken seriously, but not literally, as thethe absurd talking point that he "won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally."

Well, it should bother him.

In reality, Trump eked out "a historically small mandate," says Aaron Blake at The Washington Post. The fact that Trump did not win a mandate "is almost so obvious that it doesn't bear stating," says Robert Schlesinger at U.S. News & World Report. "Trump is a glitch president, not a mandate president."

Going "back to 1856, the first contest pitting the two major parties against one another, Trump's 2016 win is below average on every single metric," says Phillip Bump at The Washington Post. "Trump's popular vote loss was in fact historic. Trump's loss in the popular vote was three times all previous popular vote losses