The sore loser

Donald Trump claims that Senator Cruz cheated to win the Iowa Caucus. The cheating allegedly consisted of false claims about Dr. Carson quitting the campaign, the idea being to get Carson supporters to caucus for Cruz, and a campaign flier that could have persuaded the very gullible that they would violate the law by not caucusing, the idea apparently being to scare potential Cruz voters into participating. In other words, Cruz appears to be guilty of the sort of low-level dirty tricks that are par for the course in election campaigns, but the inexperienced Trump is understandably scandalized. Denouncing Cruz for these tricks is a riskier move than Trump may realize. Looking forward, he wants to galvanize people against a "dirty" rival, but when Trump goes so far as to demand a do-over of the caucuses, he risks looking like a sore loser before an electorate, the Republican primary base, that is probably more intolerant of sore losers, whoever they may be or whatever their complaint, than any other group in the country. Cruz himself has compared Trump to Senator Sanders, who supposedly is demanding a recount of the Democratic caucuses -- though in fact Sanders had decided not to contest the Iowa results by the time Cruz brought the subject up.

Trump has looked like a whiner at various points in the campaign, but until this week it didn't look as if such appearances had hurt him with his fans. You'd think they'd be even more contemptuous of whiners than the Republican base as a whole, but they are, on the other hand, motivated by a strong sense of grievance they hear echoed by Trump. Now, of course, people wonder whether Trump took his whining too far when he boycotted the last TV debate before the caucuses. If so, things could get worse for him fast if people think he's still whining after Iowa. This would be unfair to Trump since people probably should be outraged over the sort of last-minute dirty tricks that are all-too-typical of the "retail politics" Trump is still learning. But Republicans have always been quite selective about whose outrage or protests they consider legitimate. They're the "life's not fair" people, after all, and it's easy to assume that they have little sympathy for anyone crying "No fair!" after losing any competition, even though they've spent the last eight years crying "No fair!" over the results of the last two Presidential votes. In other words, since their attitude makes no sense it shouldn't surprise Trump if they suddenly behave unfairly toward him.