Sorrow and value

Oct 18th, 2017 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog
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At CNN. Chris Cillizza – who did his bit to swing the election by keeping “Her Emails” constantly in the headlines – offers a best-case interpretation of how Trump messed up that phone call.

Don’t get me wrong: he starts with reasons to believe he messed it up badly and is lying about it now.

For those who are taking Trump’s side in all of this — alleging that Wilson is simply trying to score political points against a president the Democratic base hates — it’s important to remember a few things we know about Trump.

1. In the summer of 2016, he engaged in an extended back and forth with Khizr Khan, the father of an American soldier killed in Iraq, following Khan’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. Responding to Khan, who suggested Trump didn’t know the meaning of real sacrifice, Trump said: “Who wrote that? Did Hillary’s script writers write it? I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard.”2. Trump has not told the truth about lots of things. LOTS of things. The count maintained by the Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog was more than 1,300 lies or mistruths from Trump in his first 263 days as president. In a press conference with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday, Trump said at least 9 things that were either debatable or simply false.

3. Trump has claimed he has “proof” many times. He has shown that “proof” almost never. As documented by Politico’s Edward-Isaac Dovere, here are other things Trump has said he had “proof” about: President Obama wiretapping Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign, that the women accusing him of sexually inappropriate behavior were lying, Obama being born in a foreign country, Obama’s college transcript, alleged crimes by UN Ambassador Susan Rice and that former FBI Director James Comey was lying about their personal conversations. [Narrator voice: He didn’t have proof of any of this.]

But that still leaves room for interpretation of the phone call.

Short of Wilson totally lying about the nature of the conversation, the best possible explanation for Trump is that what he said was misinterpreted. Calling a recently widowed woman of a soldier killed in action is an incredibly difficult thing to do. That’s especially true for Trump who, as a businessman prior to running for office in 2016, never had to do anything remotely like this.

Given that inexperience, it’s absolutely plausible that Trump expressed a real sorrow somewhat inarticulately, leaving Johnson’s widow and Wilson upset. And that Trump did so entirely unintentionally.

Well, no, it’s not absolutely plausible that Trump expressed a real sorrow, because he’s not capable of feeling sorrow on behalf of other people. We’ve seen that over and over and over again – with the Khans, as Cillizza said, with the people in Houston after the hurricane, with the people in Puerto Rico after that hurricane, with people he talks to on camera, with all of us, with anyone and everyone. He doesn’t feel it. At all. He never has. He doesn’t know what it’s like.

No, all that’s plausible is that he dimly understood that he was supposed to convey sorrow and sympathy. Once you grasp that it is of course not surprising that he failed so badly. He has no idea how to do that kind of thing. He can do anger and contempt and hatred all over the shop, but sorrow or compassion or empathy he can’t get near.

I suppose we should feel sorry for him, in a way. If you can’t feel sorrow or compassion no matter what – you have a terribly weakened grip on life. The sorrow and compassion are the other side of knowing what’s at stake – of valuing anything. If you don’t know how to properly value anything, what does life even mean to you?

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