President Donald Trump took to Twitter early Tuesday morning to troll Iowa Democrats over their disasterous caucus, claiming, rightly, that he was the only declared winner of the Iowa caucuses held Monday night.
“Big WIN for us in Iowa tonight. Thank you!” Trump tweeted, referencing his easy victory over Republican presidential hopefuls Bill Weld and Joe Walsh, neither of whom even came close to unseating Trump in the race for the 2020 Republican presidential nomination. Statewide, Weld got a mere 423 votes. Walsh got even fewer at 348. In total, they shared less than 3% of the total votes cast in the Republicans’ Iowa contest.
Hours later, Trump returned to social media to knock the Iowa Democratic Party and its mishandling of the 2020 caucuses, ribbing them over the fact that final results may not be available until late Tuesday, at the earliest.
“The Democrat Caucus is an unmitigated disaster,” Trump tweeeted. “Nothing works, just like they ran the Country. Remember the 5 Billion Dollar Obamacare Website, that should have cost 2% of that. The only person that can claim a very big victory in Iowa last night is ‘Trump.'”
“When will the Democrats start blaming RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, instead of their own incompetence for the voting disaster that just happened in the Great State of Iowa?” he laughed. “The Democrat Party in Iowa really messed up, but the Republican Party did not. I had the largest re-election vote in the history of that great state, by far, beating President Obama’s previous record by a lot. Also, 97% Plus of the vote! Thank you Iowa!”
Indeed, the $60,000 app designed to manage the Iowa caucus melted down completely just as results were first being reported, leaving frustrated Iowa Democrats on hold with helplines, unable to tabulate votes or calculate a winner. The party reported, early Tuesday, that the process was marred by “inconsistencies” and “coding errors,” but there’s no indication that any aspect of the reporting process worked correctly.
Former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) both declared victory in Monday’s contest, but the Iowa Democrat Party says the official results won’t be available until late Tuesday at the earliest. Most of the Democratic candidates have already left Iowa for New Hampshire, unaware of who will move into the first-in-the-nation primary at the head of the pack.
Trump also retweeted a number of news reports labeling the Iowa caucus “chaos,” outlining precisely what went wrong, and even showing caucusgoers flipping coins to determine winners.
The Trump campaign also wasted no time weighing in on the “unmitigated disaster.”
“Democrats are stewing in a caucus mess of their own creation with the sloppiest train wreck in history. It would be natural for people to doubt the fairness of the process. And these are the people who want to run our entire health care system?” Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, told media in a statement. “Tonight President Trump posted a record performance in the well-run GOP Iowa caucuses with record turnout for an incumbent.”
“They can’t even run a caucus and they want to run the government,” Parscale later tweeted. “No thank you.”