Second place is the first loozah

Don­ald Trump’s Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign just ended.

Hope­ful­ly I won’t have to eat those words; it’s the risk one takes when mak­ing pre­dic­tions, and there are plen­ty of ways I could be mis­con­stru­ing the results of last night’s Iowa Cau­cus. I’m not a polit­i­cal expert, nor am I immune to the lure of think­ing some­thing to be so because I want it to be so. It would be irra­tional to count him out, but in con­sid­er­ing a can­di­date so anti-ratio­nal as Trump, indulge me my gut feeling.

Trump’s entire appeal comes from his self-declared dom­i­nance. It cer­tain­ly does­n’t come from affin­i­ty with Repub­li­can pol­i­cy or the ide­ol­o­gy of the right. Trump is not a con­ser­v­a­tive by any mea­sure, nor is he a «clas­sic lib­er­al» or a mod­er­ate Repub­li­can (Rock­e­feller). He’s a reac­tionary author­i­tar­i­an crony-cap­i­tal­ist. But that’s not even his pitch — he’s a brag­gart and a bul­ly and those are his sell­ing points. He boasts about his for­tune, his IQ, his mem­o­ry, the size of his penis, and pre­dict­ed he would win Iowa eas­i­ly. He isn’t run­ning for Pres­i­dent as much as the office of alpha dog. In Trump’s zero-sum world there are only win­ners and losers. Right and wrong mean noth­ing; what mat­ters is weak and strong.

This is why it has­n’t seemed to mat­ter what hor­ri­ble things he says, how poor­ly-con­sid­ered his pol­i­cy pro­pos­als are, or how dis­hon­est and/or delud­ed he may be. Accep­tance or even acknowl­edg­ment of an objec­tive real­i­ty exter­nal to his nar­ra­tive would be a sign of weak­ness. Engag­ing in debate is a sport for equals, and the myth Trump spins is that he can’t be both­ered low­er­ing him­self into the muck of facts. He has the gold, he makes the rules — he does­n’t fol­low them. Try­ing to win over admir­ers of might by prov­ing might wrong is like bring­ing a slide rule to a gun­fight.

This, by the way, works both ways. Free­dom, in the words of Win­ston Smith¹, is the free­dom to say that two plus two make four. To those of us who espouse this notion of free­dom (rather than the free­dom from say­ing that two plus two make four) it does­n’t mat­ter what kind of pow­er is dis­played, at least until such time as we arrive at Room 101. We’re as unlike­ly to be moved by Trump as Trump sup­port­ers are unlike­ly to be moved by reason.

The prob­lem with this strat­e­gy, — or per­haps I should say the bless­ing of this strat­e­gy — is that once win­ning and los­ing are ele­vat­ed above the realm of ideas, log­ic, empiri­cism, and moral­i­ty, one has to actu­al­ly win. There are no alpha dogs in sec­ond place. Hav­ing built his house of cards on the idea that sec­ond place is the first los­er, when he has quot­ed Wal­ter Hagen say­ing “No one remem­bers who came in sec­ond” what can he do to be heard from sec­ond place? Espe­cial­ly when it’s nei­ther a par­tic­u­lar­ly close sec­ond nor appre­cia­bly in advance of third place. (Face it, Trump and Rubio tied for sec­ond. You can carp all you want about per­cent­age points, but Trump’s one-point lead over Rubio does­n’t win him any­thing. He and Rubio both walk away with sev­en delegates.

Trump is going to have to explain how the win­ner did­n’t win if he wants to main­tain the illu­sion of being a win­ner, but win­ners don’t make excus­es. So where does he go from here? He has to do some­thing dif­fer­ent, the sort of some­thing his sup­port­ers don’t lis­ten to.

The winners

Of course this was a vic­to­ry for Ted Cruz. First place is first place. But Cruz did­n’t do much bet­ter than expect­ed; Trump just scored much low­er than expect­ed. Rubio, by get­ting his peo­ple active and cam­paign­ing hard, estab­lished his spot as a front-run­ner. Whether he can hold on to it or lever­age it into more momen­tum is any­one’s guess, but just look­ing at the results from last night? Mar­co Rubio is the only GOP can­di­date to have sig­nif­i­cant­ly improved his posi­tion in the last 24 hours.

That, in turn, might be good for the GOP. Rubio is gen­er­al­ly mod­er­ate enough to appeal to unde­cid­ed vot­ers, and artic­u­late and intel­li­gent enough not to seem fool­ish or insane if he gets to debate the Demo­c­rat nom­i­nee in the gen­er­al elec­tion. I don’t doubt that Ted Cruz has what it takes to secure the GOP nom­i­na­tion, but I don’t see him beat­ing either Bernie or Hillary in the gen­er­al elec­tion. Rubio, I think, would stand a good chance.

Ulti­mate­ly, we all win when Trump los­es. If Trump gets any­where near the nom­i­na­tion (nev­er mind the White House) it will be time to move to a state with min­i­mal gun laws and start build­ing a bunker.