Trump is running against empathy
To the GOP, caring about anyone except
yourself makes you a sucker.
By Elizabeth Spiers
Elizabeth Spiers is the chief executive of the Insurrection, a progressive digital messaging firm.
Oct. 30, 2020 at 5:00 a.m. CDT
The
metaphor was too on the nose, even for 2020: Attendees at a Trump rally in
Omaha on Tuesday were
left stranded in near-freezing temperatures afterward, miles
away from where many had parked their cars, while President Trump jetted off to
the next campaign stop.
But
Trump’s indifference to the lives and well-being of his supporters is nothing
new. On the tarmac in Iowa last week, he told
the crowd, “I may never have to come back here again if I don’t get
Iowa,” he said. “I’ll never be back.” His campaign rallies have left a trail
of covid-19 spikes in their wake, and his administration is suing to abolish
the Affordable Care Act, which would leave many of his voters without health
insurance in the middle of a pandemic that the president has decided not to
bother trying to control anymore, apparently because he values points on the
Dow Jones industrial average more than human lives.
And
that carelessness is no accident. It’s the theme of his campaign, his
government and his party. Trump is the purest embodiment of an insidious rot in
the Republican Party — a belief in the primacy of individual interests even at
the expense of the common good. Trump is the human apotheosis of a guiding
principle that says every policy decision is a zero-sum transaction where any
benefit to someone who is not you is an automatic loss for you. Trump’s
presidency boils down to the notion that caring about others or helping others
with no expectation of material personal gain is a weakness.
In the
presidential campaign that will end in a few days, Joe Biden is an avatar of
everything Trump is not in terms of his orientation toward others. His public
experience of grief — having lost his first wife and daughter in a car
accident, and later his son Beau — have made him particularly sensitive to how
Americans are dealing with loss in the middle of a pandemic that has killed
at least 228,000 people here. He does not withhold
affection, or awkwardly pantomime it as Trump does.
For
this, Trump’s followers have heaped disdain on Biden, most notably for having
the temerity to care about his surviving son, Hunter, in public. The New York
Post published texts apparently sent between the Bidens while Hunter was in
rehab, one of which read: “Good morning my beautiful son. I miss you and love
you. Dad.” Around the same time, a photo surfaced where the men are embracing
each other and Biden is kissing his son on the cheek, prompting the right-wing
commentator John Cardillo to ask, “Does
this look like an appropriate father/son interaction to you?” Biden’s warmth
and emotional generosity, even toward his own children, is viewed as weakness.
Trump adviser Mercedes
Schlapp complained during a televised Biden town hall event that she felt
like she was watching an episode of “Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood,” and she meant
it as an insult. Being a good neighbor is antithetical to everything
Republicans stand for these days.
This is
true in the smallest ways and the largest alike. Being a good neighbor implies
a responsibility to others and a duty to look out for them. It implies that
it’s immoral to consciously enable harm to the most vulnerable and to
perpetuate injustices upon people who are disenfranchised. These values should
be nonpartisan; they’re theoretically built into the social contract. But they
do not translate into policy or rhetoric on the right. Look at the utter
disdain the right has for small gestures of open solidarity. Conservatives
today are enraged
by things like people who work in entertainment while simultaneously
expressing political opinions (exceptions made
for Ted Nugent, James Woods, Scott Baio and, well, the former reality TV star
in the Oval Office) or expressing
support for Black Lives Matter, which they dismiss
as “virtue signaling” because they cannot fathom public solidarity as anything
but performative unless it expresses support for people who are exactly like
them. (Saying that “blue
lives matter,” on the other hand, doesn’t count as virtue signaling because
it echoes a White conservative view toward law enforcement that denies the
existence of systemic racism, which implies they might have some moral
obligations to Black people.) Even simple expressions of politeness, like
asking someone their preferred pronouns — which takes as much effort as holding
a door open for somebody walking behind you — are met with incredulous
insistence that no one could possibly be doing it out of basic respect for
another person.
This is
projection, and it’s particularly disingenuous when it comes from people who
often wrap their contempt for people who aren’t White, straight, natural-born
citizens in a public Christianity, posting
Bible verses to Twitter and implying that a virtuous America is
one that is willing to separate immigrant children from their parents, strip
women of their own bodily autonomy, punish gay people for being gay and only
able to help the poor if they pass some litmus test that shows them to be
deserving. This is a perversion of virtue, but it’s a perfect manifestation of
a society where any notion of common good and shared responsibility has been
eroded by an emphasis on individualism that utterly denies the role that luck
plays in anyone’s ability to thrive and succeed and blames people who suffer
from systemic injustices for the harms done to them.
It also
leads to Marie Antoinette levels of tone-deafness by elites who cannot relate
to, and secretly despise, the plight of working people in America. “Find
something new,” warbled senior White House adviser Ivanka
Trump, who got her jobs in business and government from her father, as
millions of Americans lost their own as the pandemic decimated the economy.
Research shows that money
tends to erode empathy interpersonally, which partially
explains but does not mitigate the behavior of the Trump family — and also
explains the priorities of the Republican Party, which has gone to great
lengths to protect the interests of the 1 percent, giving them generous tax
cuts and backstopping the covid-19 losses of large companies while refusing to
bail out their actual working-class constituents. And what’s the excuse for
such stinginess? Too much federal unemployment aid might
lead people to stay home instead of going back to work. If you
needed any more evidence that the GOP has no empathy for working people, see
their apparent assumption that the working class is inherently lazy and will
not be productive citizens unless starvation is the alternative. It’s okay if
some of you die, as long as not a single one of you gets something you might
not deserve.
This
Republican notion of deservingness itself is a failure of empathy. It demands
that the poor work 10 times harder than, say, Jared Kushner, to achieve a
baseline quality of life, imposing
work requirements for benefits on people who want to work and can’t. It
says that children can be used to punish their parents, whether it’s denying
them services because of unpaid
school lunch debt or taking
them away from their parents to discourage
immigration. It says that money is the best indicator of success, hard work and
character, despite the fact that according to a 2017 study, 60
percent of private wealth in this country is inherited (as
it was by the Trumps and Kushner), and some portion of the rest is generated
through lucrative financialization schemes that add no meaningful value to
society but often harm large swaths of the population, as in the 2008 credit
crisis. It convinces people on the receiving end of luck — whether it’s the
circumstances they were born into, the people they knew, random timing, the
color of their skin or their gender, or even the intelligence they have
innately — that they deserve these benefits of all of these things, and that
conversely, the people with different outcomes deserve what they get instead.
And
elites in this regime have no reservations about saying openly that as long as
they’re taken care of, their constituents don’t matter. CNN’s Alisyn Camerota
asked Trump spokesman Hogan Gidley this week whether he was concerned
about Vice
President Pence’s upcoming rally in Wisconsin, which could prove to be
a superspreader event. “Hospitals in Wisconsin are near capacity. Does that
give you any pause, or the vice president any pause, about going there and
holding a big rally?” she said.
“No, it
doesn’t,” said Gidley, apparently thinking of whether Pence might be contagious
— since several of his aides
recently tested positive for the coronavirus — but not worrying
about any rally attendees who could easily infect each other. “The vice
president has the best doctors in the world around him, they’ve obviously contact-traced
and have come to the conclusion that it’s fine for him to be out on the
campaign trail."
