Maybe he understood. Maybe it was calculated. Maybe he saw the potential in being able to display clearly to all of America how corrupt the current system is. Once that message was understood by the normally uninformed voters, it provided more opportunity for voters to turn to the “outsider” who’s running. Him.
Who knows? He’s not an idiot. He seems always to have been a couple steps ahead of the competition from the get-go, and has a well-honed sense of strategy.
I honestly don’t think he even thought about CO from some time ago. It’s clear his team didn’t make any effort in ID, SD, UT either. And, barring some remarkable development, they didn’t need those states.
But I think after he saw the reaction, he immediately pounced on the “unfair” and “undemocratic” angle. This wasn’t pre-determined-—it was a gut reaction that people are sick of the system being “rigged” and this looked very much LIKE a “rigged” system, even if it wasn’t.
In short, Trump tapped into the emotions people already had about the system. We have many examples in history where perceptions of what happened triggered a major upheaval, even if the specifics were wrong: the Indian Mutiny of 1857, or the French Revolution’s “let them eat cake.” The DETAILS of the specific event were only SYMBOLS of deeper concerns.