Consider this a case study in exactly how willing Donald Trump is to lend a helping hand to anyone, including his own supporters.
A few weeks back, during one of his endless Oval Office press conferences, an attendee who was a guest at the event collapsed and fell on the floor. After a brief glance at the fallen guest, as others scrambled to assist, Trump turned away and stared straight ahead, annoyed at the interruption to his word salad.
He just stood behind his desk like a sullen lump and, at one point, appeared to be sleeping—suggesting utter indifference to someone else’s distress. Everyone else in the room dove in to help the person who had just lost consciousness, but not Mr. Empathy. Mr. Empathy stood behind his desk, fuming that the guest had stolen his limelight.
Donald Trump is no fan of human frailty, even his own. The pancake makeup that was formerly confined to his face has now spread to cover the bruises on his hands. His ankles, enlarged by chronic venous insufficiency (a condition that afflicts overweight elderly people who spend too much time sitting), are concealed behind his desk.
Trump recently had an MRI at Walter Reed Hospital but was unable to recall which parts of his body had been imaged, leading one to suspect that his dementia is proceeding apace. While it seems that he tries to mask his infirmity by running his mouth continually, it is a deeply flawed strategy. The more he talks, the more clearly diminished he seems.
As another denial of his obvious decline, he keeps crowing about acing a “cognitive test.” The cognitive test to which he constantly refers consists of questions that any average kindergartener could answer. This challenging assessment asks examinees to identify a picture of a horse, along with asking them what year it is, what day it is, what their name is, and where they live.
So, our genius of a president is no fan of infirmity, including his own, and no fan of anyone else who suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He referred to John McCain as a loser because McCain was captured and subsequently tortured, for years, by the North Vietnamese. He has referred to fallen soldiers who died in the invasion of Normandy as suckers and losers, too—after all, what kind of an idiot would enlist in the military? Certainly not idiot Trump.
When placed in photo-ops with wounded warriors during his first administration, Trump insisted that “no one wants to see that,” and he told his own nephew, who asked him for financial assistance for his profoundly disabled son, to let the son die. Needless to say, there was no loan.
Trump sat in front of his television set on January 6, 2021, drinking Diet Coke and watching a violent mob of crazed seditionists beat senseless the Capitol Police; he watched and allowed it to continue for hours. The officers injured in the line of duty are still waiting for their get-well cards and flowers. As for an apology from Trump, that is scheduled to occur on the 12th of never.
The utter trauma of the Epstein victims has also gone unnoticed by Trump. If he were not so empathy deficient, he might not have said that Epstein “stole” one of his underage spa workers, Virginia Giuffre. Because he perceived Miss Giuffre as his personal property, he ejected Epstein from his club. (Giuffre lost her battle with depression this year and took her own life.)
Evidently, it has yet to occur to Trump that Virginia Giuffre, a ninth grader at the time, was not his property. She was a teenage girl who was deceived, lured into sexual slavery, and raped repeatedly by Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, the repulsive toad formerly known as Prince Andrew, and God knows how many other wealthy pedophiles. It seems that God may end up being the only entity who will ever know the truth because Trump is working like a maniac to prevent the release of the Epstein files. He cares more about protecting himself and his wealthy patrons than he cares about helping the victims.
Trump does not care that his tariffs are making consumer goods unaffordable. He just shrugs and tells American parents to buy fewer Barbie dolls for their children this Christmas. He was equally untroubled by withholding food and medical services from citizens in need during the government shutdown.
He ended PEPFAR and USAID, in spite of the fact that in doing so, he consigned whole populations to starvation and death. He allowed food to rot in warehouses rather than distribute it to the intended recipients. He ended our national observance of World AIDS Day because, honestly, who wants to acknowledge the suffering of people who are dying so unattractively?
He eviscerated FEMA, not caring if Americans receive disaster relief. He hired Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to destroy public health infrastructure, not caring if Americans die of preventable illness. He hired Pete Hegseth to murder Caribbean fishermen. He hired Pam Bondi to abuse immigrants and reprise the Trump 1.0 policy of family separations. He is allowing the EPA to roll back regulations that prevent the release of nuclear waste into our water supply.
So, the next time you feel the need to extol the virtues of Donald John Trump, just remember: he could not care less if you drop dead, but he would prefer that you do it off camera.
