There are some things that most adults have grown out of. Donald Trump spent Wednesday doing a bunch of them.
Having lost the Iowa caucuses to Ted Cruz fair and square, by a solid 6,239 votes, about 15 percent of his own vote total, Trump took to Twitter and threw a day-long temper tantrum or, as Cruz deftly put it, “Trumpertantrum.”
On the night he lost, Trump had given a rather gracious concession speech, a fact that drew comment because it was a surprise to many people who have watched his antics over the past seven months. But after it sank in over the course of 36 hours that he was actually one of those “losers” he mocks, he demanded that “the State of Iowa” (which doesn’t actually run the caucuses) disqualify Cruz and hold another vote. His public display of bitterness and ill-grace escalated throughout the day with, for example, a threat to file suit.
Trump’s complaints are meritricious rather than meritorious. First, he complained about a Cruz mailer that attempted to shame Iowans into caucusing by grading their voting frequency and that of their neighbors. This tactic, which probably hurt Cruz more than it helped him, is standard fare in politics. It has been used in recent cycles by many candidates and by both parties. It didn’t hurt Trump’s chances at all, and it certainly isn’t a reason to re-vote.
Second, Trump argued that it was fraudulent for Cruz’s campaign to send out a late email hinting that Ben Carson was about to drop out of the race. Cruz’s email was based on, or perhaps took advantage of, a CNN report that Carson was going to Florida not New Hampshire or South Carolina after the contest was over in Iowa.
Perhaps this tactic persuaded a few dozen voters. Was it underhanded? Sure. Is it more underhanded than Trump’s persistant implication in recent months that Cruz is ineligible to be president because he was born in Canada? To ask the question is to know the answer. Of course not. Trump’s smear is significantly more dishonest than anything Team Cruz did in Iowa.
Trump should be embarrassed by his behavior. It is difficult to imagine that he will be, but it is easy to imagine some voters taking the view that a candidate so petulant should not be handed the keys to the White House. There are two ways of reading Trump’s fit of pique, neither of them flattering. One is that he is boneheaded. The other is that he’s cynically assuming voters are boneheaded.
Trump was considered a joke candidate when he entered the race, as he has admitted. But he built a support base among disillusioned people who loved the way he smashed politcally-correct crockery (bashing Muslims, Mexicans and Jeb Bush). He persuaded many people that he is a winner who proceded through life from one glorious victory to another.
To maintain support from those he attracted with this ruse, he is now smashing more crockery and still claiming to be the real winner — one denied his proper triumph by a political thief. The truth is, he came a lot closer to coming third than he did to winning.
One of the blessed characteristics of our stable democracy is that power is handed from one president to the next peacably. It is in politically backward countries that losers respond to defeat by undermining the legitimacy of the process and making false accusations of treachery against those who have bested them. Trump’s cynical, self-serving charges against Cruz are not helping make America great again.
