Culture

America’s Just One Big Pile Of Schadenfreude After Donald Trump Lost The Iowa Caucus

People are learning to laugh at Donald Trump again :')

by Alex McKinnon  3 February 2016

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After ten months of relentless, exhausting campaigning, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent and dozens of candidates wrestling for the world’s highest office, America’s finally gotten around to actually starting the equally drawn-out and tiresome process of formally picking who’s going to be the next President. Yesterday the Democratic and Republican parties held their respective Iowa caucuses, a much-hyped event in American politics as it marks the start of the official campaign season.

The importance of the Iowa caucuses is perceived, at least in the media, to be vastly larger than the tiny number of voters and eventual delegates they attract: Iowa only has around three million people in it, but people are so desperate for concrete results after almost a year of vague polling and meaningless predictions that the state’s caucuses come as something of a relief. More importantly, these first results can give an idea of which candidates are in with a genuine shot, and which ones should’ve gracefully bowed out a long time ago.

According to the results, a very large number of would-be Presidents fall into that latter category: former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, and Mike Huckabee, a Republican, have both announced they’re pulling out of their respective races after garnering miserable results. No less than six Republican also-rans pulled less than two percent of the vote in Iowa, while Jeb Bush — the guy supposed to be the party’s frontrunner this time round — only managed a dismal 2.8 percent after spending $14.9 million on campaigning in the state. That translates to about $2,884 for every vote he eventually got, which still seems like a bargain if it managed to convince even a handful of people to vote for this guy.

But possibly the biggest loser on the day was the guy almost everyone expected to win. For months, Donald Trump has defied popular expectation, topping a crowded Republican field long after so-called experts expected him to fizzle out. Trump went into the Iowa race confidently predicting”a tremendous victory,” and most political coverage and search-engine data seemed to agree with him. 

With the results finally in, though, Trump only managed to place second behind Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who carried the state with more than 27 percent of the vote. Worse, Trump almost fell into third place courtesy of Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who pulled a surprisingly respectable 23 percent.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean the Trump campaign is over by any stretch — he has the money, the profile and seemingly the inclination to keep going, he still leads in national polls, and he’s expecting a win in New Hampshire, the next state on the Republican calendar. But he’s also an arrogant, loudmouthed racist who wouldn’t shut up about how much he was going to win, so you can get why America’s taking the day to gleefully mock its new national figure of fun.

Particularly sweet was this old Trump tweet from 2013 people found meditating on the impotence of coming second in anything. People are retweeting it like crazy today, for some entirely unfathomable reason.

Trump, for his part, has reacted by sending out a bunch of tweets downplaying the result, taking potshots at Cruz and the media, and generally acting like the giant sooky baby with an enraged rodent on his head that he is.

It’s anyone’s guess how the rest of the nominee race will go, but if the fallout from Iowa is any indication, America’s just going to be one big Trump-piñata-bashing party by the time all this is over. Sounds like fun!