Donald Trump is feeling the heat. And he doesn’t like it. And he’s making more of an ass of himself than usual.

If you watch his Twitter timeline, it is an incessant series of complaints about unfairness mixed with masturbatory puffery about his own excellence.

11,000 inside venue tonight in Tampa! Broke record set by Elton John in 1988 w/out musical instruments! Another 5,000 outside. Will be back!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 13, 2016

Is this true? We don’t know because we do know that Trump regularly lies about the attendance at his rallies. Then we have

Millions of $’s of false ads, paid for by lobbyists-special interests of cheater @SenTedCruz and sleepy @JebBush, are now running in S.C.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 12, 2016

and my favorite

If @TedCruz doesn’t clean up his act, stop cheating, & doing negative ads, I have standing to sue him for not being a natural born citizen.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 12, 2016

of course

.@realDonaldTrump You believe legal standing is only triggered if people persist in being mean to you? Does Trump U have a law school?

— Popehat (@Popehat) February 12, 2016

and this also places Trump in the unenviable position of disagreeing with himself:

In an interview with ABC News in September, Trump said he did not think Cruz’s birthplace was an issue. “I hear it was checked out by every attorney and every which way and I understand Ted is in fine shape,” he said.

A couple of months ago, my colleague, Dan McLaughlin wrote a piece at The Federalist on Donald Trump’s strategy and why it works. First, there is OODA Loop, conceived and popularized by USAF Colonel John Boyd:

Boyd, an Air Force fighter pilot, Vietnam and Korea veteran, and fighter design engineer, is best known for the “OODA Loop” or “decision cycle,” a concept he developed as part of a broader study of “patterns of conflict” in the 1970s and 1980s later widely adopted in the military, especially the U.S. Marine Corps. OODA stands for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act, and refers to the process by which soldiers in combat—or humans engaged in any form of conflict—absorb information, make decisions, and act on them.

If you watch Trump’s Twitter stream you see this in action. Before one of his opponents can identify an attack and answer it, they have been hit by a half-dozen unrelated attacks.

Another feature is strategic ambiguity.

Second, a crucial concept in Boyd’s work is ambiguity. An opponent who wishes to counter your approach will want to ascertain your intentions, capabilities, and movements, and respond accordingly. It becomes much more difficult to do this if you are able to keep your intentions and actions unclear to the opponent for as long as possible.

The whole article bears reading. You should really take the time to do it.

A key part of this ambiguity is a phrase that has been adopted by the left to show that they are smart, but which really means they aren’t, is “reality based community“.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

This, in a nutshell, is how Trump operates. He creates a reality (I like Ted; I hate Ted; I don’t have a problem with Ted; Ted is a cheater; No problems with Ted’s citizenship; Ted isn’t a natural born citizen) and while you are responding to the current reality, he creates a new reality.

What Trump is discovering, though, is that this cuts both ways. Trump is used to having it only work his way; of being allowed to create the temporary reality that he wants to work in. Earlier this week, Trump announced he had pulled an attack ad targeting Ted Cruz as a “member of the Washington establishment.” One has to see this as an effort to set Cruz off balance. Ever since he had his ass handed to him by Cruz in Iowa his has been attacking Ted Cruz in very un-manly ways and yammering on and on about how he, Trump, was cheated of his rightful win in Iowa and generally, dare I say, acting like a big pussy. Now, suddenly, he’s declared a truce. Anyone but an idiot has to know by now that Trump will take up the attacks again, but right now, just before the South Carolina primary, he wants the pain to go away. But the pain isn’t going away. In fact, the pain is going to get worse.