The Trumps, Parscale and the rest of their wretched gang will fold what happened in Iowa into their persistent narrative: Democrats are hapless, and the traditions and institutions that Americans are asked to trust don’t deserve that deference.

Iowa is a prompt for cynicism. Cynicism is President Trump’s lifeblood.

As predictable as Parscale’s tweet were formal complaints about the credibility of the vote count from Democrats worried about their showing in the caucuses. One came from Joe Biden’s campaign, which argued that “considerable flaws” should be examined and addressed before any results were accepted.

And so the victor in Iowa may be denied his or her full measure of credit and exultation, the losers may be spared some of the usual damage and one or more of the candidates and his or her supporters may question the fairness and legitimacy of how the entire Democratic primary plays out. It’s 2016 all over again. Wasn’t the party supposed to learn from its mistakes?

There’s no excuse for this, not given how long the Iowa Democratic Party had to prepare, not given the privilege of the state’s first-in-the-nation status, not given how deeply invested tens of millions of distraught Americans are in the effort to get rid of an unfit, amoral president. That effort can’t start like this.

The debacle was a specific betrayal of Iowa’s voters. I spent most of the past week in Iowa, where I was wowed and moved by how much thought Iowans were putting into which candidate they’d caucus for. They made clear that they saw Trump as an existential threat. So they weren’t merely deciding on a favorite candidate. They were anointing a savior and anxiously unsure about who represented the surest and best hope.

I’d never seen voters so twisted into knots. I’d never seen pundits so perplexed by the tea leaves in front of them and so hesitant to play fortuneteller. I’d never been so stymied for insight, so barren of instinct. This wasn’t a political contest; it was a kidney stone.

And by late Tuesday afternoon, it still hadn’t passed.

The candidates, too, were betrayed, cruelly and destructively so. They tried to work around the crazy ambiguity, delivering remarks to their supporters that neither declared victory nor conceded defeat, because no one was yet victorious and no one yet defeated — not officially.