I have apparently been mistaken as to how much Mike Huckabee really expected to win this nomination as opposed to merely raise his television/public circuit profile. When someone pointed out to him the other day that Ted Cruz had sewn up the vast majority of evangelical endorsements in Iowa, Huckabee did not respond with an “Aw shucks, Ted is great and he’s the flavor of the moment but I think in the end they’ll come around to the warm blooded fury of Huckamania.”

He responded with a brutal rip on the entire Iowa evangelical leadership community and some rhetoric that indicates that Mike Huckabee is maybe a little bit deluded as to what he could realistically politically accomplish:

In an interview with Fox News pundit Todd Starnes on his podcast, the former governor of Arkansas was asked if he felt betrayed by evangelical leaders and organizations that have gravitated towards Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.

“Well, certainly a sense of disappointment, and yet I do understand because, as I’ve often said, ‘I don’t go to them, I come from them,’ but because of that I do understand them,” Huckabee said. “A lot of them, quite frankly, I think they’re scared to death that if a guy like me got elected, I would actually do what I said I would do, and that is, I would focus on the personhood of every individual. We would abolish abortion based on the Fifth and 14th Amendment. We would ignore the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision.”

Huckabee said that, as a result of his presidency, evangelical organizations would no longer be able to galvanize their supporters and fundraise.

“A lot of these organizations wouldn’t have the ability to do urgent fundraising because if we slay the dragon, what dragon do they continue to fight? And so, for many of them, it could be a real detriment to their organization’s abilities to gin up their supporters and raise the contributions, and I know that sounds cynical but, Todd, it’s just, it is what it is,” Huckabee said.

I hardly know where to start with these statements. Even as a guy who believes pretty strongly in abortion as the defining issue of our time, I find the level of power Huckabee believes the Presidency contains to be absolutely astonishing. It’s all the more astonishing that what he believes the President apparently has the political ability to do, especially if that President is him.

Folks, this is way more delusional than Donald Trump thinking he’s going to win the Hispanic vote, or believing that he can solve every problem America has just by the sheer force of his deal-making personality. One wonders, if Mike Huckabee is such an amazing and effective politician, why he even needs the endorsement of these naysayers anyway – Trump seems to be getting along fine in Iowa without them.

And moreover, there’s a surprising bitterness underneath the folksy exterior of one Mike Huckabee, folks. Huckabee doesn’t just believe in himself way too much, he immediately goes for the explanation that makes people who don’t believe in him look absolutely worst: that they are grifters who are preying on fear for their own financial benefit.

Something tells me that this is not what Mike Huckabee would have done unto him if the roles were reversed, but as Kermit the Frog once observed, “That’s None of My Business.”