A Humble Trump? Sorry, 'Loo-zahs'
Ever since Donald Trump entered the Republican presidential race, I have been waiting to see him lose. I wanted to see how he would handle it. Humility, after all, is not an emotion with which the Donald appears to be intimately familiar.
Remember when his rival Ben Carson, the retired brain surgeon, was running neck-in-neck with him in polls back in November, occasionally beating him? "How stupid are the people of Iowa?" Trump raged about Carson in a Fort Dodge rant. "How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?"
What, I wondered, would be his reaction if the people of Iowa decide with their votes that they are not going to believe Trump's crap, either? Would he stand in stunned disbelief? Would he stagger off the stage babbling nonsense? Would he howl in protest about how he was robbed, perhaps by illegal immigrants?
We found out Monday night after he decisively lost Iowa's Republican caucuses to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and finished only a whisper ahead of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Trump tried something that was different, even for him. Call it "humility lite."
"I absolutely love the people of Iowa," he said, beaming his wall-to-wall grin like beacon in the night. "Unbelievable."
And he repeated himself in his usual fashion ("I love you people," he said. "I love you people") as if he were talking to third-graders or perhaps trying to woo the crowd through mass hypnosis -- and repeated himself again.
"I'm honored," he said. "I'm really honored."
He congratulated the winner Cruz, thanked Mike Huckabee for dropping out and failed to mention Marco Rubio, who finished third in a fashion that over-performed his polling as much as The Donald underperformed. "We will go on to get the Republican nomination and we will go on to beat Hillary or Bernie or whoever the hell they throw out there."
But Trump left quickly. What more was there for him to say? His spell was broken. All of his talk about what a winner he was in a world full of "loo-zahs" and how he was going to make all of us winners, too, had fallen to dust.
When he's elected, he used to say, "There will be so much winning...!"
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