Donald Trump's evisceration of second-place finishers is coming back to haunt him

What Donald Trump thought about second place in 2013. — (Image credit: ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images)

After losing to Sen. Ted Cruz in the Iowa caucuses on Monday night, second-place finisher Donald Trump could find no respite on his communication medium of choice. Twitter users inevitably dug up a Trump tweet from 2013 which sees the runner-up declaring that people who take second are irrelevant:

By contrast, Trump's concession speech in Iowa took a conciliatory tone, featuring congratulations to Cruz and "all of the incredible candidates."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.