Trump gets stuck in reverse

It might sound laughable to you for a candidate who has trafficked in the wildest rumors about his rivals to suddenly be in an enormous lather about another campaign’s lax fact checking.

But here we are.

Donald Trump has not been shy about, ahem, extrapolating from press reports or what “everybody has told [him]” to elevate rumors into national news stories. Some highlights include calling Ben Carson “pro-abortion,” suggesting Ted Cruz backed the Keystone pipeline because he was seeking to aid his native Canada, and, most famously, nurturing conspiracy theories about President Obama’s birthplace.

Trump said those things because he was trying to bring down a rival, and in the case of Carson, at least, weeks of damaging attacks and speculation, including about Carson’s mental health, did their work. And Trump has shrugged off those who have complained about his tactics. As one of his mottoes goes: “When somebody screws you, screw ‘em back, but a lot harder.”

But having lost in Iowa despite a long-standing lead in the polls, Trump has adopted a love of pure political discourse that would make the League of Women Voters stand up and cheer.

Trump is full of outrage that Cruz’s staff pushed out a CNN report to caucus goers that Carson was heading home to Florida instead of on to New Hampshire, suggesting his departure from the race was imminent. Carson, as it would turn out, was actually not leaving the trail for good, but rather heading home for a fresh change of clothes. Trump also now takes issue with a piece of pre-election Cruz junk mail that unwitting voters might have believed was a formal notice from an election official.

Leaving aside virtue and propriety, which is always good practice when talking about politics, the question is: Did Cruz’s tactics work?

Cruz may have helped pad his margin, but it’s doubtful that any of that swung the race to Cruz. Both he and Carson outperformed pre-election polls, so there’s not much evidence that the rumor mongering did significant harm. And it is not likely that Trump would have been the main beneficiary of any votes lost to the Cruz tactics. A late surge for Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., suggests that he might have been the recipient of any additional Carson runoff.

So Trump’s loss seems most attributable to the fact that his voters did not show up to caucus despite having told pollsters they would. If Cruz’s ploys worked, they were only of marginal significance.

How about Trump’s new gambit? Can an effort to invalidate his Iowa defeat by howling about unfair play change the narrative? It may have begun as a fit of pique, but now it is his current campaign strategy. With voting in New Hampshire five days away, it looks like a bad idea.

Trump’s current lead in the RCP average of New Hampshire polls is 21 points, meaning that Iowa should already be in his rearview mirror, if he wanted. 2012 second-place Iowa finisher and New Hampshire shoo-in Mitt Romney sure wasn’t still talking about Iowa three-days later he was hyping up his coming triumph.

Trump’s need to focus on New Hampshire is even greater. We know that voters there are capable of big post-Iowa swings and we also know from Monday’s result that Trump’s coalition didn’t turn out for him the way he needed. While Romney had spent years cultivating New Hampshire voters and served as governor of neighboring Massachusetts for four years, Trump is new in town and lacks any discernable large-scale organization in the state.

While it is still hard to believe Trump would lose, it’s also hard to believe that his looking back in anger at Iowa will do anything but harm him in New Hampshire. As with his decision to skip the only Iowa debate, Trump risks alienating supporters and reinforcing the notion that he can’t handle adversity.

Trump can fight Cruz on issues or even character, but if he doesn’t stop re-litigating Iowa, he could find that his next bunch of sour grapes will be of the Concord variety.