Donald Trump, noted beclowner of himself, has admittedly taken far longer than I thought he would to accuse people of cheating in the Iowa caucus. This is the same man who was honored by a second place finish, after all, and was thrilled with the results just yesterday morning. Only for this to happen.

Recent Presidential front-runner* Donald Trump made the mistake of committing actual libel this morning. Specifically, he accused current Presidential front-runner Ted Cruz of illegally tampering with the Iowa caucus results. Here’s the screencap of the Tweet in question:

As you can see from the link here, Donald Trump proceeded to rapidly delete that Tweet and replace it with one where “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he illegally stole it” became “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it.”  It’s the ‘illegally’ that’s the problem, of course.  Youcould have made enough of an argument that the latter sentence wasn’t really an accusation by Donald Trump that Ted Cruz committed a felony last Monday; but when you explicitly call it ‘illegal’ then you can’t really use that dodge any more.

Trump’s feed has only gone downhill from there, going full blown conspiracy mode, claiming Cruz’s results should be nullified. It does appear he’s trying to backtrack from the “illegally stole” claim by saying in some tweets it’s because of “lies” Cruz told voters – that he supported single-payer and abortion (he does).

That it took Trump this long to say all this is amazing. I thought he’d utterly snap that night, not wait two days before constructing his very fashionable tinfoil hat.

PPP is also currently saying they’ve got a national poll coming out that show’s Trump’s standing is “significantly diminished” after Monday night. While I hesitate to trust PPP given how far left and genuinely awful they are, I don’t doubt the overall trend will be to this effect. Iowa has already claimed Martin O’Malley, Mike Huckabee, and (this morning) Rand Paul as victims of its caucuses. Trump underperformed expectations Monday night, fighting Rubio for second place, rather than Cruz for first place.