Since last summer I've felt an unease in my gut.  Unlike many in the news media and in public life, I never dismissed Donald Trump's chances of winning the Republican nomination, and maybe the presidency, too.  Newsmen and -women caught up with my view as the year passed.  Polls elevated Trump to the title, "Republican frontrunner," held by him day after day, week after week.  At debates he occupied the center spots behind lecterns, surrounded on either side by politicians for whom he felt contempt.  Now, one of those political rivals, Senator Cruz, has beaten Trump in Iowa, earning Cruz the title, Republican frontrunner.  Trump, meanwhile, and it gives me pleasure to write this, is a loser.
     Coming in second place, Trump finished well, but when we compare this result with the bravado and self-assuredness shooting from this man's mouth from the first day of his campaign, his performance looks weak.  Trump uses the word weak to put down opponents from Jeb Bush to Hillary Clinton, and again, it feels good to call him weak.  After all, his Iowa loss can now clearly be seen as the result of spotty local campaigning in a state whose voters like to meet their candidates and get a good one-on-one sense of them.  Ted Cruz won Iowa because of his organization, a strong voter-based effort with an Evangelical underpinning, while Trump landed (literally) on Iowa several times, held rallies filled with like-minded racist and bigoted idiots, and never bothered, except once, to stay overnight in the state, when he went to an Iowa motel and let us know the next day that the bed was "very comfortable."  He found out that motels, by and large across the country, are adequate resting spots for those car-bound folks who don't have private jets that can send their owners back to private towers after a day of campaigning, whereas Cruz, by bus, bothered to make himself known to Iowans, and it paid off.
     In New Hampshire, the second state in the long-distance race to gain nominations, we can expect a similar phenomenon: Trump, a fly-away-at-the-end-of-the-day campaigner, will have a hard time besting Cruz, or maybe Marco Rubio, while he refuses to behave unlike a billionaire asshole with his own escape plane.
     Chris Christie came in tenth place in Iowa.  He plans on campaigning the fuck out of New Hampshire, and indeed, has done plenty of it in past months.  Still, tenth place!  Ego, perhaps, holds him together in the face of what used to be regarded as disaster.  Another low-ranking loser in Iowa, Mike Huckabee, can now count himself as a "friend" of Donald Trump, who was impressed, I guess, by Huckabee's showing up at Trump's cynical raise-money-for-veterans rally.
     I seemed to say positive things about Ted Cruz in this post, but bear in mind I still think his ideas are batshit crazy.  However, if Cruz is the weapon to disable and defeat Donald Trump this year, I approve of his Iowa victory, and whichever victories follow that prevent Trump from reaching the Oval Office.
     Trump, after the news of his loss, congratulated Cruz, and went tweet-silent for fifteen hours.  When he came back alive he bragged about his Iowa performance, saying how impressive it is that a non-politician, having never done this kind of thing before (Cruz, bear in mind, hadn't either), did so well.  He failed to mention his calling Iowans "stupid" in past months, and also his off the cuff remark about running for president--that if he doesn't win, "all this," including campaigning in Iowa where he said this a month or so ago, "will have been a waste of time."
     He blames the news media for his loss, as if their wall to wall coverage of him over the past seven months didn't demonstrate their dedication to ratings, which are like polls to the major news networks.  In a previous post, I predicted that if Trump were to lose in Iowa, or New Hampshire, or wherever else, he would whine in his tweets and in interviews like we haven't heard him whine before.  If we examine our memories, we can recall kids we knew in school who were like this: after the setting up of expectations to an unrealistic height, the excuses would follow, and you either wanted to walk away from them, or kick them in the balls.
     The news networks now have an opportunity to kick the loser, Donald Trump, in the balls.

                                                                             Vic Neptune