The End of Empathy

Evening Dispatch

As Donald goes increasingly off the rails, former members of his administration go on the record about Donald’s admiration for Adolf Hitler, and yet another woman comes forward with a credible allegation of sexual assault, I’ve once again been confronting this horrible conundrum: Why is it that the more awful things Donald does, the less it seems to matter?

You know the drill—any one of those things would be disqualifying for any other candidate, Democrat or Republican, The sexual assaults, inciting an insurrection, two impeachments, stealing classified documents, the criminal convictions—a tiny fraction of all the horrific acts Donald has committed over the decades.

But there’s one thing fundamental to who Donald is that should be enough to convince any sane American not to vote for him: He has no empathy. This means that he is incapable of caring about the suffering of other human beings and that is why he’s so comfortable causing it.

I think it’s important to know why.

Back in 2016, I had no doubt that having Donald in the White House was going to be worse than most people could possibly imagine, and that’s because I knew two things most people didn’t: First, Donald’s extreme narcissism, which is undergirded by an insecurity so deep it has rendered him a black hole of need—makes it very easy for people to manipulate him—especially if they have real power (think Putin and Kim Jong Un). 

Second, Donald’s increasing lack of empathy will drive him to even greater and more depraved depths of cruelty as he continues to deteriorate psychologically.

Because both his narcissism and lack of empathy informed everything Donald did when he was in the White House, he caused incalculable harm, especially to those people he considered enemies or those who were in some way disposable or beneath his notice. 

I thought about that a lot during the recent hurricanes. Remember Donald’s stunt when he visited Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria?is way of “helping” was to throw rolls of paper towels at those who survived.

For decades, Donald has been willing to use other people’s tragedies to inflate his sense of his own superiority or to increase his status in the eyes of the world. On September 11, every single New Yorker was in serious pain. We were devastated and we were in shock. We were terrified because we didn’t yet know what we had lost, and because we didn’t know if things were going to get worse. Donald seemed to be the only person who didn’t care about the tragedy that was still unfolding. As Ground Zero still smoldered, he went on the air to say (falsely) that his building was now the tallest in Manhattan, as if it actually mattered.

Sometimes, Donald acts as if the suffering of others bores him. Two decades before the World Trade Center was attacked, my dad was dying in an emergency room that was only a ten-minute drive from my grandparents’ house. Instead of going to the hospital to be with their son, my grandparents stayed home and waited by the phone for the doctors to call. Donald went to the movies with my aunt Elizabeth. My father died alone.

Donald’s shocking indifference during COVID reminded me a lot of the way my family treated my father—both in life and death. In August 2020, just before the U.S. surpassed 150,000 deaths from COVID, Jonathan Swan interviewed Donald and when he pointed out that a thousand Americans were dying every day, Donald said, “It is what it is.” 

That was a popular expression in my family, and hearing it sent a chill down my spine because when they said it, it always represented a cruel indifference to somebody else in despair.

As with most of the worst things about Donald, we can blame my grandfather, Fred.

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If we’re lucky, as infants and toddlers we have at least one emotionally available parent who consistently fulfills our needs and responds to our desires for attention: somebody who holds us and comforts us and soothes us. Getting the right kind of attention at a young age creates a sense of safety and security that ultimately allows us to explore the world around us without too much fear or anxiety. We learn that we can count on the bedrock support of at least one caregiver. 

We also experience mirroring, which is the process through which an attuned parent teaches toddlers how their minds work and, in turn, how to understand the world. Mirroring is the root of empathy.

If we’re really unlucky, like my dad and Donald and their other siblings were, you have a father who’s a sociopath and a mother who, for various reasons, can’t function as the primary caregiver. If you want to know what it looks like when a child has not been sufficiently held, soothed, or mirrored, you just have to look at Donald Trump.

My grandfather’s sociopathy aside, his kids might have been ok if my grandmother hadn’t become seriously ill when Donald was about two and half—perhaps the most crucial developmental period in a child’s life. She had several surgeries and, for about a year, either because she was in the hospital or because she was in pain, she was either emotionally or physically absent. This had the greatest impact on her two youngest children, Donald and his little brother, Robert.

Because of their ages, the two boys were incredibly vulnerable, especially since there was no one else to fill the void. Fred, by default, was the only available parent, but he had no interest in parenting—especially young children. Donald’s needs, which had been met inconsistently even before his mother’s illness, were barely met by his father at all.

Fred was much more likely to be a source of fear or rejection, which put Donald in an intolerable position: being totally dependent on the one person who was also likely to be a source of his terror.

In order to cope, Donald began to develop powerful but primitive defenses, marked by an increasing hostility toward other people, especially people in authority, and a seeming indifference to his mother’s absence and father’s neglect. 

The indifference became, over time, a kind of learned helplessness. Eventually Donald would have a very difficult time getting any of his emotional needs met at all because, to protect himself, he had to act as if he didn’t have any. In place of those needs grew a kind of grievance and behaviors—link bullying, disrespect, aggression—that served their purpose in the moment but became more problematic over time. 

It’s possible Donald could have overcome these early deficits but, unfortunately for him and everybody else on this planet, those behaviors became hardened into personality traits. Why? Because his father came to value them. Fred Trump wanted a son who was a “killer.” When that turned out not to be my father, Fred started to validate, encourage, and champion all of the worst things about Donald. This made him extremely useful not just to my grandfather, but, over time, to other powerful men who learned that flattery was the only weapon they needed to wield to get Donald to do their bidding.

As unlikely as it might seem, the one thing Donald has most wanted in his life, is to be loved. It’s also the one thing his father, who gave him a massive fortune, power, and attention at the expense of every other person in the family, rendered impossible.

That’s the origin of Donald’s grievance and his rage and his indifference to anybody who suffers because, as far as he’s concerned, nobody suffers as much as he does. Donald has never been loved—he has only been of use. That’s what makes him want to burn it all down because the pain of that reality can never be assuaged, only deflected.

In 2016 and 2020, the thing that most troubled me, that wounded me, that I took so personally, was how many people were willing to overlook or embrace Donald’s cruelty.

In 2024, it should be clear that he’s never going to get better, he is only going to get worse. Much worse. We know this.

The only thing we don’t know yet is what’s going to become of the rest of us.