A wounded Trump could turn out to be worse than a winning Trump. He has the means to stay in the race, he’ll still be on stage at debates dogging the other candidates, and he has the ego to simply not go away.
Donald Trump’s Existential Pickle
IF your very candidacy and identity rest on your supposed talent for victory, can you survive a defeat?
.. Neither his image nor his ego leaves any room for a setback, any allowance for second place. And as Iowa draws near and several polls suggest the strong possibility that Ted Cruz will finish ahead of him there, it’s time to talk about what that would mean for a self-enamored emperor who pretty much insists on his own perfection — and who has built his brand on it.
At that point, Trump would no longer be a brilliant exception to the laws of political gravity. He’d be someone whose lax management of his Iowa operation was laid bare, whose basic competence was in dispute
.. Challenged on his policies (which don’t really exist) or his credentials (which are dubiously applicable to the presidency), he whips out his poll numbers as proof of his worthiness. Sometimes he whips them out just for fun. And as he holds them high, he makes the argument that he must have good ideas, good sense and good preparation. After all, he’s winning!
Larry Ellison on Winning: Everyone else must fail
The Danger of Putin Losing in Syria
Part of the problem is what psychologists call “loss aversion.” Losing hurts twice as bad as winning feels good—whether in a tennis match or a war. The idea of accepting even a small loss can seem intolerable, and people are tempted to risk greater losses for a shot at the win. The gambler who drops 20 bucks in a casino doesn’t walk away; he doubles his bets. In a similar vein, the president who loses 1,000 soldiers in Vietnam doesn’t end the war; he sends half a million Americans into the mire. It’s hard to imagine Putin accepting defeat. He has cultivated an image as the father of the Russian people, who is restoring the country as a world power. If Assad’s regime falls, Russia could lose its only military installation outside the former U.S.S.R.—the naval base in Tartus, Syria. Therefore, if the war effort collapses, Putin may want to salvage something from the wreckage, potentially moving the conflict into a dangerous new phase. He could intensify Russian air strikes or deploy “little green men”—as the Russian soldiers serving unofficially in eastern Ukraine were called. Once Russian troops start dying in Syria, all bets are off... Instead, the optimal opportunity for a peace deal may be a situation in which Putin believes a decisive triumph is not possible, but he can still save face by spinning the outcome as a success. In other words, he needs a story to tell the Russian people about the positive results of the mission. This narrative doesn’t need to be true, but it does need to havetruthiness, or a seeming plausibility. And so, to get Putin out of Syria, the United States might need to play along by avoiding boastful claims of a major Russian debacle. In 1989, after the Berlin Wall fell, U.S. President George H.W. Bushdeliberately refused to declare the development a win—to avoid complicating the life of Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev.Putin needs a victory speech. And Washington may have to help him write it