Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Trump didn't choose his supporters, his supporters chose him

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

Renée Graham of The Boston Globe looks not at the nasty things that the shoe salesman says but who is listening to them.

Now when he derides Biden’s stutter by saying things that Biden never said — like pretending Biden stumbled over the word “democracy” in a January speech when he said it more than two dozen times without any problems — Trump gets the nasty laughs he seeks at someone else’s expense, especially when he sneers at a person’s physical limitations.

People who behaved that way were once scorned. Now they become the Republican nominee for president.

There are few among us who don’t know how it feels to be the butt of a joke. At some point in our lives, we’ve probably been the person being laughed at instead of being someone in on the joke and chuckling with the crowd. That includes Trump’s supporters. But with their always aggrieved state of mind, they have anointed Trump as a strongman who allows them to belittle those they see as their lessers. To paraphrase the great Toni Morrison, they can only feel tall when someone else has been knocked to their knees. For them, Trump’s enemies are their enemies and those people deserve nothing but public derision.

Of course like all bullies who are, in fact, weak and insecure, Trump can’t take what he so readily dishes out. Remember his years-long misogynistic tantrum, even during presidential debates, after Rosie O’Donnell mocked him on “The View” in 2006 for acting like an arbiter of morality?

Trump is a known quantity; ever since he rode down that escalator in 2015, he’s been saying progressively more and nastier and dangerous political rhetoric.

He simply wouldn’t say that much nasty and mocking rhetoric if he didn’t have an audience for what he says.

I always remember: Trump didn’t choose his audience, his audience chose him.