Politics

Donald Trump's Post-Iowa Twitter Meltdown

Iowa's second-place finisher accuses Ted Cruz of stealing the election.

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If you can't be a winner, be a whiner. In a series of tweets this morning, Donald Trump is insisting that Ted Cruz stole the Iowa caucuses and demanding a do-over:

I don't remember anyone getting a second shot at a contest on The Apprentice, but then, I stopped watching that show after season two. Maybe they changed the rules later on.

What does Trump mean by "the fraud"? He brings up a false rumor spread by the Cruz team, in which Ben Carson supposedly dropped out of the race; and he mentions a mailer Cruz distributed that aimed to shame nonvoters. Both were rather sleazy tactics, but neither is the sort of thing that's gonna lead any caucus to cancel its results. (In the case of the mailer, which came to light days before the voting, the backlash against it may well have cost Cruz more votes than it gained.) Then Trump gets to this:

So if a candidate doesn't like the way another candidate describes his record, the second candidate's victories get cancelled? By that standard, Trump disqualified himself ages ago, and so did pretty much everyone else in the race.

But of course Trump doesn't actually expect anyone to nullify Iowa's results. The real point here is to make an excuse for losing:

Snapshot from 2018: President Trump in his fallout shelter, mashing keys on a broken laptop, tweeting excuses for the apocalypse to an audience of zero.