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.

Jack Shafer of POLITICO says that for all the polling and media reports that people the American electorate did not want Biden v. Trump 2.0, the results of the primaries show that it’s exactly what the American electorate wanted.

This fundamental misreading of the sense of the electorate has produced flawed coverage and threatens to contaminate the remainder of the campaign unless reporters pay closer attention. Sure, some voters aren’t inspired by Biden vs. Trump any more than they were Nixon vs. Humphrey. And sure, both candidates are disliked by half of the country. But the illogical yammering, based on polling, that the two candidates selected aren’t the ones most voters want threatens to sour otherwise interested voters from casting their ballot.

If Republican voters were so turned off by the thought of a rematch, they certainly didn’t show it when they went to the polls this year. They voted overwhelmingly for Trump over the eight debate-qualifying candidates in all but the Vermont and District of Columbia primaries. As for all the Biden derision, the president accomplished two real feats in the starting months of the nomination fight: 1) he cleared the field of serious contenders and 2) he swept the primaries like a diesel street sweeper. Whatever their doubts, Democrats swallowed them to embrace their end of the rematch. (Perhaps one asterisk to note: Both Biden and Trump shaped the rules of the primaries to their own advantage. The Biden-controlled DNC moved the South Carolina primary to the front of the line, and Trump forces changed delegate allocation rules to benefit the former president. Still, voters made the final call.)

Belle Cushing of Columbia Journalism Review writes about the return of print issues to high school journalism newspapers.

Print may have largely vanished from the broader media landscape, but in high schools across the country, it’s alive and well. In 2020, 70 percent of school newspapers had a print edition, according to data collected by the Center for Scholastic Journalism at Kent State University. And in places where print editions have died, students are bringing them back: The Beacon, the student newspaper at Forest Hills High School in Queens, relaunched its print newspaper in 2022 after a ten-year hiatus; it likewise cited “a lack of school spirit” as its motivation.

Some of the resilience of paper in schools comes down to how student publications tend to be run—that is, by older faculty advisers who are more familiar with, if not stubbornly nostalgic for, print. But in recent years, print has gained a newfound pull among young people, whose experience with physical newspapers is likely limited to visits with their grandparents.  

For students like Otto and Fella, a newspaper in print has a kind of throwback appeal, like a Polaroid camera. “Because it’s somehow new and retro, it’s interesting,” Fella said.

[…]

Kevin Kirms has witnessed this phenomenon firsthand. He runs the School Publications Company, a New Jersey printing house that has produced newspapers for high schools since 1926. After printing zero school papers in 2020, his numbers are now higher than pre-pandemic levels, and schools are opting for higher-quality paper and color editions. “A lot of the schools that went to digital newspapers are realizing that nobody’s reading them,” he said.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. provides to The Atlantic an excerpt from his new book, The Black Box: Writing the Race, about checking that “Black box” of race and how Black people have always attempted to escape from the confinement of that “Black box.”

Eleanor Margaret Gates‑Hatley, who looks like an adorable little white girl, will live her life as a “Black” person, because her father and mother checked the “Black” box. That choice will define so very many of Ellie’s encounters with the world—from how her college application is read to how her physician assesses her risks for certain medical conditions. And she will be destined, throughout her life, to face the challenge of “proving” that she is “Black,” simply because her self‑styled “race man” grandfather ardently—and perhaps foolishly—wished for her racial self to be socially constructed that way.

[…]

As a professor, I try to teach my students about how Black people have sought to escape from this box. But even more important, I endeavor to expose them to the long tradition of Black discourse, and the often disregarded fact that Black people have been arguing with one another about what it means to be Black since they began to publish their thoughts and feelings in the latter quarter of the 18th century.

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had the audacity to insert himself into the morality of American involvement in the Vietnam War, for example, even—or especially—several of his fellow leaders of the civil-rights movement told him that he was out of bounds, demanding that he redirect his concerns to issues relevant to those doomed to dwell within the black box, advice that the good reverend boldly ignored.

The moral is that there never has been one way to be Black; that African Americans are as varied and as complex in their political and religious beliefs as any other group. And they have voiced those internal differences with great fervor and passion, stunning eloquence, and vehemence, often even subjecting those Black thinkers with whom they disagree to the nastiest and pettiest ad hominem attacks.

The “Black box” has always been a major underlying theme throughout the years that I’ve been doing my biweekly essays at Black Kos.

Pooja Chaudhuri and Jake Godin of Bellingcat do an interesting analysis of all the environmental damage done to Gaza by civilians cutting down trees (for heat in lieu of fuel) and IDF attacks on Gazan agriculture.

On February 29, the Union of Gaza Strip Municipalities issued a statement saying that Gaza Strip communities had not received fuel deliveries since October, a fact that was causing a cascading effect across all sectors of society and leading to “great suffering.” These acute fuel shortages have led civilians to cut down trees in order to start fires for cooking or warmth. In a food security report from December 2023, the World Food Programme stated that 70 percent of internally displaced people (IDPs) in southern Gaza burn firewood for fuel and 13 percent waste products.

Bellingcat’s analysis of satellite imagery from Gaza, conducted with our partners at Scripps News, shows clear signs of the mass removal of trees which intensified in the winter months. These areas include cemeteries, parks and a university campus.
 

Importantly, satellite imagery shows that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have removed significant numbers of trees for stated military purposes, though more often in orchards and farmland. These cases can often be distinguished by the presence of vehicle tracks; the relative absence of vehicle tracks when done by Palestinian civilians is a tell-tale sign of the fuel shortages which drive them to such desperate measures.

Juan Diego Quesada and Carolina Mella of El País in English report that Ecuador’s government is deceptively collecting genetic profiles from its prison population.

The government of Daniel Noboa is secretly creating a database of genetic profiles by deceiving prisoners in Ecuador’s prisons, according to three sources to which EL PAÍS has had access. The officials who carry out this task tell the inmates that these DNA samples, which will go to a state information bank, will help them be identified in the event of a massacre, something that happens in penitentiaries in the country; or in the event of identity theft. Prison workers are instructed to convince them not to consult with their lawyer and to make them believe that the procedure is part of normal prison routine. What these officials are concealing from their charges is that the latter have the right by law to refuse to have samples taken from them, and that this genetic information can be used to implicate them in crimes that they committed in the past or that they will perpetrate in the future. Performing this procedure is mandatory for toxicologists, anthropologists, forensic chemists and forensic psychologists.

[…]

The military have also entered the prisons to try to regain control. The government has taken advantage of this circumstance to begin carrying out genetic registration. In recent weeks, forensic experts have received instructions on how to perform an oral swab. At the Cotopaxi prison, near Quito, which holds 4,346 inmates, only four have refused to undergo the test. In Riobamba, a prison in the Andean mountains, the entire prison population ended up being registered. “You should not read the consent forms to the PPL [persons deprived of liberty], they do not even understand them,” are the instructions that the forensic experts have received, according to three different sources. The National Service for Comprehensive Attention to Adults Deprived of Liberty and Adolescent Offenders (SNAI), the entity in charge of Ecuadorian prisons, declined to answer the questions posed by EL PAÍS.

DNA, indeed, can help identify prisoners in the event that they are murdered in riots, which in Ecuador are of unusual violence: beheadings with knives, dismemberments, burning of corpses. The information that is withheld from inmates is that these records can also be used to involve them in crimes that they are going to commit in the future or that they have already committed in the past. For example, a prisoner convicted of murder who provides his genetic material could have his sample match those that were collected in a rape case. A genetic sample can only be requested by a judge or prosecutor. The percentage of people who agree to provide this information is very low in cases that are settled in court, according to one expert, which is why it is more than suspicious that the government has convinced practically the entire prison population to do so.

So…President Noboa will be next year’s guest at CPAC, I take it?

Finally today, Benjamin Dreyer, writing for The Washington Post, wonders what do we do with all of the anachronistic words floating around nowadays.

I’ve never really been one to subscribe to the Oscar Wilde school of thought, in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” that “there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” But I wonder whether dear Oscar might, these days, extend his distaste for enforced anonymity to include subtweets.

Now, a subtweet, if you’re unfamiliar with the term even at this late date, is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a usually mocking or critical tweet that alludes to another Twitter user without including a link to the user’s account and often without directly mentioning the user’s name.”

The coinage dates to 2009, when Twitter was still Twitter and posts there were referred to as tweets. But if Twitter has been X’d out and tweets are no longer tweets but posts instead, what is to become of the useful coinage “subtweet”?

Given that the word now has become a generic term used on other social media platforms (hello, my friends at Bluesky), I suspect that “subtweet” will join the ranks of what are known as anachronyms: words that are used “in an anachronistic way, by referring to something in a way that is appropriate only for a former or later time.”

Everyone try to have the best possible day!