Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Battlegrounds

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

We begin today with Rex Huppke of USA Today asserting that the shoe salesman cares about nothing and no one but himself.

Let’s be clear about several things. Trump doesn’t care about the U.S.-Mexico border or immigrants in general. He doesn’t care about [murder victim Ruby] Garcia or her family in Michigan. And he definitely doesn’t care about you. (Yes, even you, MAGA fans. You're his marks, not his friends.)

Donald Trump cares about Donald Trump, and that is all. If claiming he had spoken with a grieving family helps Trump spook voters into thinking he alone can protect them from an imagined wave of criminal immigrants, then that’s good for Trump, and quite literally nothing else matters.

[...]

I didn’t hear Trump, between his xenophobic rants, saying he would address the ease with which violent men can obtain firearms. I didn’t hear him mention how, according to the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety, an average of 70 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner each month. Trump was silent on the fact that, according to the Emory University School of Medicine, 5.3 million women are victims of intimate-partner violence each year.

He didn’t mention those things because he doesn’t care about them, and he doesn’t care about them because those issues don’t help him.