1. Republican donors who dislike Trump still denying Cruz and Kasich needed funds

Donald Trump’s childish response to his loss of national delegates to Sen. Ted Cruz’s superior campaign is bordering on ridiculous. The rules are the rules, and they’ve been in place for a long time. Trump has chosen to forego a ground game, for the most part, and has – at best – disorganized and amateurish campaign organizations in most states.

That’s his own fault.

Demanding that the rules now be changed to accommodate his campaign’s incompetence is immature.

Here’s how he responded on Fox News on Monday, after being blown out in the Colorado delegate process:

“I’ve gotten millions of more votes than Cruz, and I’ve gotten hundreds of delegates more, and we keep fighting, fighting, fighting, and then you have a Colorado where they just get all of these delegates, and it’s not (even) a system,” Trump said, “There was no voting. I didn’t go out there to make a speech or anything.”

If he’s only now learning how Colorado awards its delegates, that’s not Cruz’s problem, nor even Colorado’s. That’s the fault of his thuggish campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski – whose business it is to know how primaries are won.

And that’s an important point to make here. Trump rails about how undemocratic this election is. He’s wrong about two things. First, this isn’t a democracy. Second, this isn’t an election.

On the first point, Trump should know that the United States is a republic. It’s not a direct democracy, and that’s by design.

“The Framers (of the Constitution) founded a republic because they recognized that mob rule could be just as great a threat to liberty as the rule of a king,” the Heritage Foundation notes. “Representation, Madison explains in Federalists 63, is ‘sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions.’ America’s constitutional framework thereby seeks to protect the people from the dangers of unchecked popular democracy.”

A real democracy is an ugly thing, because it has no checks against what is called the tyranny of the majority – no protections for those whose opinions may be different from the 50 percent-plus-one that constitutes a majority.

Trump’s second mistake is thinking that the primary selection process is an election, in the purest sense of the word. It’s not. It’s a mix of straw polls, caucuses, primary conventions and, yes, elections. But it’s entirely a party-driven and party-led thing.

There is an election; it comes in November. For now, there are a series of events in which the major political parties choose their nominees for that election.

How they do so varies from state to state. Some have caucuses – open events where voters can attempt to sway each other. Some have closed primary elections (in which only voters registered in a particular party can help choose that party’s nominee). And some have open primaries – in which any voter from any party can participate. Yes, it’s complicated. But no one is stealing anything.

Trump has decided he wants to play politician. He should at least learn the rules of the game.