After at least three victory speeches in South Carolina on Saturday night – delivered with full and earnest conviction, defying the doubters and predicting a surefire path to the presidency – you could be forgiven for thinking there were at least three Republican winners.

For a country that celebrates its winners and immediately, deliberately forgets its losers, it was a strange turn of events to watch Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz all give victory speeches after Trump’s win. Republicans (especially Trump) like to accuse President Obama of trying to turn America into a feeble European-style home of losers; no one in America celebrates even their respectable defeats quite like the Europeans do.

So watching Rubio and Cruz declare victory despite defeat was much like watching the British crack open champagne to celebrate sixth place at the Olympics.

Donald Trump, the real victor in South Carolina (and now the clear frontrunner for the nomination), was unusually gracious in his victory speech – not to his rivals, of course, but to his family. For the first time, Trump willingly surrendered the microphone to his wife Melania Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump. And not since John Kerry’s nomination has the American voting public had to parse such a thick accent from the spouse of a candidate promising to make America strong again.

Trump initially gave some cursory praise to Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio for doing “quite well” but, when his supporters booed, he reassured them this playacting was “just one second” and that “tomorrow morning we’ll be back.”

Back to what? Back to the type of campaigning he so clearly loves. “It’s tough. It’s nasty. It’s mean. It’s vicious,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”

It turns out that beauty is, like victory, in the eye of the beholder. Because minutes after Trump finished extolling the beauty of a mean, vicious campaign, the candidates who lost to that campaign pretended, entirely shamelessly, that they had in fact won.

Rubio, who has yet to win a single primary or caucus, proclaimed that he would win the nomination. “The children of the Reagan revolution are ready to assume the mantle of leadership” he said, ignoring the uncomfortable fact that no state and no poll has yet handed him said mantle of leadership.

If that wasn’t egotistical enough, Rubio compared his arrival in South Carolina to his Cuban parents arriving in America: “To me, South Carolina will always be the place of new beginnings and fresh starts.”

If losing counts as a fresh start, it’s hard to see how Rubio’s speechwriters would describe his excitement in the unlikely prospect of success. If he comes first in New Mexico, will Rubio begin his own inauguration parade straight to Washington DC?

Ted Cruz, in his defeat-as-victory speech, at least made an attempt to identify who or what he had beaten so convincingly. It turns out that Cruz came first against something called Expectations, a cruel and ugly opponent determined to snuff out the very spirit of America.

Cruz explained how he had won in Iowa. But since that was a few weeks ago, he couldn’t countenance that being his only win, so he explained how he had also “defied expectations” in New Hampshire. And now South Carolina had “given us another remarkable result.”

“Remarkable” is how you describe a friend’s performance in a play you’d rather forget.

Cruz also declared victory in his effort to end Obamacare, which (as we all know) would certainly have been a remarkable result for the Texas senator in a one-state primary election.

“We will not go quietly into the night and give up on a brighter America” he said, in perhaps the truest statement to emerge from his lips: quiet, Cruz is not.

The man who truly lost _ and had the honesty to admit it _ was the former establishment pick known as Jeb!. The Bush dynasty threw all its generational power behind its second son, and its donors threw more than $100 million on top of that, all to no avail. So Bush gave a tender appreciation of his wife and family, and conceded to what his rivals refuse to acknowledge: reality.

For their part, those rivals could barely tell the truth about Bush himself.

Cruz said that Bush had not lowered himself to “the gutter” with “insults and attacks” which conveniently ignored Bush’s debate performance, his Twitter trolling and his Super PAC’s ads.

Rubio praised Bush as “the greatest governor in the history of Florida” but conceded that he hadn’t yet spoken to him, probably because they are reportedly no longer on speaking terms.

It’s hard to see how even one of two such delusional candidates – Rubio and Cruz – can bring themselves to stand aside and support the other to stop Donald Trump. But if neither man can, they will be celebrating defeat for many weeks to come.

And as the great orange hope of the Republican party put it on Saturday night, that’s “beautiful” – at least, it is if you’re either a Democrat or Donald Trump.