The best part of this is watching some Trump fans this morning trying to do damage control by insisting that he didn’t call Cruz a pussy, it was an audience member who did. Night and day. Trump merely … amplified the sentiment so that thousands of people could hear it, then jokingly pretended to scold the person who shouted it. The room full of Trump supporters cheered him the whole way. What could possibly lead you to believe from that that he, and they, were endorsing what she said?

And why would his base even want to spin for him on this? Isn’t this the genital subtext of the whole campaign, that Trump has “balls the size of watermelons” (as the woman who insulted Cruz put it) whereas everyone else is a pussy? The only surprise is that it took Trump this long to actually use the word himself — and that he used it on Cruz rather than Jeb Bush, whom he’s been emasculating using various other euphemisms for the better part of nine months now.

Mic found the woman who originally shouted the comment about Cruz. She declined to tell us her name or be photographed, but agreed to answer a few questions. The 52-year-old woman from Salem, New Hampshire, said the Trump event was her first political rally of the cycle, but described herself a “huge Trump supporter.”

“I watched the debate, and [Ted Cruz] just comes across as a pussy,” she told Mic on the floor of the Verizon center. “He doesn’t have the balls to stand up to Putin. He doesn’t have the balls to stand up to other leaders of others countries.”

When asked whether she trusts Trump, she answered, “He’s got the balls the size of watermelons, whereas the other ones got the balls of little grapes.” She then specified the size of other candidates’ testicles. “The other one, Rubio, [has balls] like a raisin.”

One reason that Cruz is a “pussy” about waterboarding, by the way, is because his father was tortured by Batista’s government in Cuba, which understandably left the junior Cruz a bit squeamish about pressure tactics. Team Cruz could have mentioned that in their reply to Trump but instead they chose to keep it light. Here’s Cruz’s spokesman, Rick Tyler, using the word “whipped” very deliberately, I suspect:

.@realDonaldTrump turning the campaign into the latest episode of a reality show but let's not forget who whipped who in Iowa.

— Rick Tyler-Still Right (@rickwtyler) February 9, 2016

Says Ben Shapiro, “By broadening the label ‘anti-PC’ to simple vulgarity, Trump does those of us who despise PC a grave disservice.” Good point: The more people equate “anti-PC” with standing up at a presidential rally and calling someone a pussy, the more trivial the effort seems. But I think this has been part of Trump’s appeal since the beginning, that by him being “anti-PC” in a particular way, like calling for mass deportation of illegals, it allows other people to be “anti-PC” in their particular way. His alt-right fan base is a perfect example; Trump has stayed away from white nationalism but they see him as a kindred spirit anyway because, at its most basic level, being politically incorrect means saying things that the political class normally won’t tolerate, whether that’s “build a wall” or “Cruz is a pussy” or “white power.” Trump has moved the Overton window on what’s acceptable in political discourse even at the presidential level. That’s great in some ways, less great in others.

Go read David Brody, who thinks undecided evangelicals in South Carolina and beyond won’t look kindly at Trump for profane wisecracks like this. They’ve forgiven him his other excesses so I don’t see why this would be a big deal, but if you’re looking for a scenario where Cruz has the last laugh on him, there you go.