Donald Trump does exactly what he was expected to do

IOWA IS SUPPOSEDUNJFK to surprise. Ted Cruz won there in 2016, Rick Santorum in 2012, Mike Huckabee in 2008. There was no upset this year: won the Iowa caucuses by 30 points, in line with his polling lead before Iowans gathered in a blizzard to do their thing. Mr Trump won 98 of Iowa’s 99 counties. The only other candidate to win one was Nikki Haley, Mr Trump’s former ambassador to the . She came first in Johnson County, home to the University of Iowa and therefore a good place to gauge the mood of college-educated Republicans, by a margin of 0.03%. With a few votes yet to be counted, that mini-triumph could yet be reversed.Mr Trump was magnanimous in victory, congratulating his opponents—one of whom, Vivek Ramaswamy, dropped out and endorsed him. Mr Ramaswamy has called Mr Trump “the best president of the 21st century”, so it was never really clear why he was running against his idol. Mr Trump only releases the crazy when he loses. In 2016, to steal attention from Mr Cruz after his win, he came up with a bizarre riff about the senator’s father being involved in ’s assassination. “You need controversy for traction sometimes,” Mr Trump mused before the caucuses this year. Even when he wins, though, Mr Trump still likes to assert his dominance by making things up and watching his fans accept them as truth: he claimed to have won the Iowa caucuses for the third time in a row.