When Donald Trump Doesn’t Win

By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

It’s impossible to predict when Donald Trump’s supporters will finally have enough of his bombast and bigotry, or when (if ever) he will decide to cancel the 2015-16 season of his reality-show campaign and go home. But if he does, we are getting a pretty good idea of how it will happen – with an epic outburst of petulance.

After he came in second in the Iowa caucuses on Monday, Mr. Trump gave a fairly gracious speech. Then he went ominously silent for hours before erupting on Twitter, as Maggie Haberman wrote at The Times.

He blamed the news media, of course, for not covering his second-place win sufficiently. “Got second highest vote total in history,” said Mr. Trump, who under other circumstances would probably have explained to us that the second-place finisher is just the best of the losers.

Mr. Trump blamed Iowa voters for not giving him enough credit for spending his own money on the campaign. “I will keep doing, but not worth it,” he tweeted.

And then he started blaming Ted Cruz, whose campaign workers told caucusgoers at one point on Monday that Ben Carson was planning to drop out of the race. Mr. Cruz later offered an apology, and Mr. Carson woke up from his nationally televised nap long enough to accept.

Mr. Trump is hurling his own accusations. “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he illegally stole it,” Mr. Trump said on Twitter. “That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!” He later replaced that tweet with one that dropped the word ‘illegally.’

Cruz workers, as it turns out, were guilty of bad behavior at the caucuses. They were probably chewing gum in the hallway, too. Someone should tell the principal.

But the caucuses are not an election, and they are not terribly democratic. Lyndon Johnson and others have compared them to a cactus, unfavorably.

And it’s not clear that the polls were all that wrong. The Cruz/Trump contest ended roughly within the margin of error. It was Senator Marco Rubio’s strong third place showing that was the surprise of the night.

Still, Mr. Trump wants satisfaction! “Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified,” he tweeted. He might want to ask Rick Santorum how much mileage you get out of a recount in Iowa.

Mr. Trump lost in Iowa because his ego blinded him to the fact that he needed data, TV ads and a real ground game in Iowa. It wasn’t Mr. Cruz’s fault, or the fault of the media — not even Megyn Kelly.

But this is the Donald Trump that lurks beneath the surface. Behind that blustering, bullying exterior is a blustering, whining interior. If Mr. Trump decides that people are being unfair to him by not letting him win, he will stamp his foot, pick up his toys and go home. Sounds like a good plan.