Donald Trump’s Sunday rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden was only the most recent of the many hate fests that have marked not only his campaign this year but arguably his entire history as an American political figure. Reading the Bulwark’s report, I stopped when I hit the words “Tucker Carlson.” That was enough.
I went back, however, and read more mainstream coverage looking for a mention of any emotion that was not connected somehow to hate, fear or prejudice. I didn’t find one. Of course, I wasn’t expecting to find any of the normal stuff typically absent in discussions about Trump and his minions – empathy, humility, kindness. I knew that a Trump rally would be a desert when it came to anything smacking of what MAGA and its Dear Leader consider weakness.
Still, I was looking for even a hint of the strength necessary to feel sorrow. I saw a story in Popular Mechanics, of all places, about the 17,000-year-old skeletal remains of a child that was discovered in 1998 in southern Italy buried in a cave in Monopoli, a town on the Adriatic Sea. Recent DNA analysis of the remains revealed that the child died when he was about one year and four months old, probably of a congenital defect called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a condition which makes the walls of one of the ventricles in the heart thicken until they can no longer pump enough blood to keep a body alive. So, 15,000 years before the date which marks the start of our calendar, a truly ancient man and woman had a baby that died probably before he could walk or speak.
There are cave paintings in France depicting bison, other animals and humans from this time, called the Upper Paleolithic Era. A cave in the foothills of the Pyrenees has a wall painting from several thousand years later depicting a battle fought between humans using bows and arrows. So we know that there were human beings in southern Europe intelligent enough to record some of their lives, including the animals they hunted for food and at least one war fought between competing tribes. And now we know something of the depth of their sorrow. They were anguished enough by the death of their child that they saw to it that he was buried beneath two stone slabs in a cave, where the depth and method of burial preserved his remains to the extent that his teeth were recovered along with enough other skeletal material to make DNA analysis possible.
We can now say that we have a date, some 17,000 years in our past as humans, when sorrow was felt by this ancient grieving couple. Someone, perhaps the father and mother themselves, or the father and another man, or the mother and another woman from their settlement on the Adriatic, carried the child’s body deep into a cave and lifted two heavy slabs of stone and placed them over the body to mark the spot where he was buried. These early humans took time out of days which they probably devoted mostly to hunting and fishing for survival, to do this work to record that their boy existed. Their work is evidence of their despair.
The capability of feeling sorrow is perhaps our most important emotion as humans. The death of a loved one, especially the death of a child, is so painful, that humans are motivated to do almost anything to prevent it or stop it. Medicine could be said to have resulted from sorrow; religions record sorrow by marking the deaths of holy figures; ceremonies and graves are the result of sorrow. To feel sorrow, to grieve, is the essence of what it is to be human.
We have seen sorrow recorded and shared by Democrats at rallies. During her debate with Trump, Kamala Harris highlighted the stories of women who have suffered and died due to extremist anti-abortion laws that prevent emergency care when pregnancies fail or go wrong. To feel sorrow for the despair of women and men alike who have been affected by these tragedies has become part of our politics as Democrats since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Jeffrey Goldberg reported in The Atlantic that Trump reneged on a promise to help pay for the funeral of a Hispanic soldier murdered at Fort Sill. “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” Trump reportedly told his chief of staff in a White House meeting. He then ordered that the funeral not be paid for. Trump denigrated dead soldiers at Arlington Cemetery. He refused to attend a memorial for soldiers killed in World War I, calling them “losers.”
It isn’t a question of his lack of empathy or his disrespect for the military and for soldiers killed in battle. The question is, where is his sorrow?
The answer is apparent. Donald Trump has no sorrow.
The capability to feel human sorrow, an emotion we now know is at least 17,000 years old, does not exist within the former president. The evidence is in his words. It is in his actions. By that evidence, the look on his face as he spews hate on the campaign trail is not human.
