In a tweet that existed only briefly, like a soap bubble in a toilet bowl, Donald Trump just accused Ted Cruise of illegally winning the Iowa caucus, which is to say Ted Cruz broke the law.

This is not a small thing to throw at a political rival in an election year!

The tweet was quickly deleted and then replaced by a version that omits the word “illegally,” perhaps because some lawyer advised Trump that publicly accusing someone of criminality is itself a great legal liability. Bad!

FEC regulations are sprawling and opaque, as is Donald Trump, so it’s hard to tell exactly which law he alleged Cruz violated. But his followup tweets give us some idea:

Trump concludes that the results from Iowa should be “nullified” entirely:

Candidates—especially salty ones—routinely accuse each other of such and such misdeed and general sliminess. And it does seem like Cruz engaged in some middle school election trickery to sabotage Ben Carson’s already shitty victory prospects at the caucus. But accusing your rival of actually breaking the law is much more rare and generally stupid unless you’ve very sure it happened. Given that Trump deleted his claim after only seven minutes, he’s probably not very sure at all.

Tweet screenshot via William Turton

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7