Trump And The Military-- A Very Bad Match

Mark Hertling is a retired Lt. General, who wrote, yesterday at CNN.com, that "If you ask people who haven't served in uniform what it takes to be a great military leader, many would say "strength," "toughness" or "courage." People who have served-- and particularly those who have had the honor of commanding-- will tell you there's a lot more to it. Leaders-- military or otherwise-- need character, intellect, vision, humility and will. Leaders also need empathy. In fact, this particular trait is discussed in detail in the publication Army Leadership... The doctrinal definition of empathy is rather simple, describing the trait as 'Identifying and understanding what others think, feel and believe.'... Good people are empathetic-- and, as a great sergeant I worked with once taught me, 'The secret to being a good leader is to first be a good person.'... America prizes leadership, but I fear our nation is losing its ability to empathize. We see this every day on television, on social media, in interpersonal exchanges. Assignment of derogatory nicknames, the trolling of individuals on social media, the lack of comity when debating competing ideas and a failure to show courtesy to those with different ideas about any specific subject are all examples of what we see on a daily basis, in a variety of forums. And while I wouldn't blame President Donald Trump as the sole force making Americans less empathetic, his continuous example of poor behavior and caustic communication is certainly making matters far worse."

Last night, Jeffrey Goldberg, tackled the problem Trump has with the military-- polls showing his support among active duty service members low and dropping. When Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, "he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that 'the helicopter couldn’t fly' and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true. Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, 'Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.' In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as 'suckers' for getting killed."

Trump finds the notion of military service difficult to understand, and the idea of volunteering to serve especially incomprehensible. (The president did not serve in the military; he received a medical deferment from the draft during the Vietnam War because of the alleged presence of bone spurs in his feet. In the 1990s, Trump said his efforts to avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases constituted his “personal Vietnam.”)

On Memorial Day 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery, a short drive from the White House. He was accompanied on this visit by John Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security, and who would, a short time later, be named the White House chief of staff. The two men were set to visit Section 60, the 14-acre area of the cemetery that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars. Kelly’s son Robert is buried in Section 60. A first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, Robert Kelly was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan. He was 29. Trump was meant, on this visit, to join John Kelly in paying respects at his son’s grave, and to comfort the families of other fallen service members. But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.

“He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself,” one of Kelly’s friends, a retired four-star general, told me. “He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no money in serving the nation.” Kelly’s friend went on to say, “Trump can’t imagine anyone else’s pain. That’s why he would say this to the father of a fallen marine on Memorial Day in the cemetery where he’s buried.”

I’ve asked numerous general officers over the past year for their analysis of Trump’s seeming contempt for military service. They offer a number of explanations. Some of his cynicism is rooted in frustration, they say. Trump, unlike previous presidents, tends to believe that the military, like other departments of the federal government, is beholden only to him, and not the Constitution. Many senior officers have expressed worry about Trump’s understanding of the rules governing the use of the armed forces. This issue came to a head in early June, during demonstrations in Washington, D.C., in response to police killings of Black people. James Mattis, the retired Marine general and former secretary of defense, lambasted Trump at the time for ordering law-enforcement officers to forcibly clear protesters from Lafayette Square, and for using soldiers as props: “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” Mattis wrote. “Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens-- much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”

Another explanation is more quotidian, and aligns with a broader understanding of Trump’s material-focused worldview. The president believes that nothing is worth doing without the promise of monetary payback, and that talented people who don’t pursue riches are “losers.” (According to eyewitnesses, after a White House briefing given by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, Trump turned to aides and said, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?”)




Yet another, related, explanation concerns what appears to be Trump’s pathological fear of appearing to look like a “sucker” himself. His capacious definition of sucker includes those who lose their lives in service to their country, as well as those who are taken prisoner, or are wounded in battle. “He has a lot of fear,” one officer with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s views said. “He doesn’t see the heroism in fighting.” Several observers told me that Trump is deeply anxious about dying or being disfigured, and this worry manifests itself as disgust for those who have suffered. Trump recently claimed that he has received the bodies of slain service members “many, many” times, but in fact he has traveled to Dover Air Force Base, the transfer point for the remains of fallen service members, only four times since becoming president. In another incident, Trump falsely claimed that he had called “virtually all” of the families of service members who had died during his term, then began rush-shipping condolence letters when families said the president was not telling the truth.

Trump has been, for the duration of his presidency, fixated on staging military parades, but only of a certain sort. In a 2018 White House planning meeting for such an event, Trump asked his staff not to include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. “Nobody wants to see that,” he said.

The Trumpist Regime knows this is bad, bad news and that he could actually lose votes over it... so he's been hysterically denying it at every opportunity he's had in the past day and a half. A couple of hours ago, Fox News confirmed Goldberg's story (Twitter thread above). I hope Fox decides to run it on air too.

Trump's Mental Condition Should Be Sounding Real Mayday Alarms

President Empathy

Trump actually said this Thursday: "Our death totals, our numbers, per million people, are really very, very strong. We’re very proud of the job we’ve done." That depends whose side he's on, ours or the pandemic's. Let's see, the death totals per million he's so proud of...

Here's a list of countries who are doing a better job at that along with the number of deaths per million Trumpaznee said he's so proud of. First the U.S.:

193 Deaths Per Million

• Japan- 3
• Australia- 4
• South Korea- 5
• Argentina- 5
• Russia- 8
• Mexico- 14
• Czechia- 22
• Israel- 26
• Brazil- 28
• Iceland- 29
• Norway- 39
• Austria- 65
• Iran- 73
• Germany- 79
• Denmark- 79
• Canada- 85

This morning, Peter Baker's NY Times column was a sort of May Day warning about the impact of Trump's diseased brain: Amid a Rising Death Toll, Trump Leaves the Grieving to Others as the country's raw death totals crossed the 64,000 mark. But first let me drawn your attention to a brief discussion at WebMD about the differences between a psychopath and a sociopath, each of which Trump is routinely diagnosed as, although the official diagnosis is antisocial personality disorder.

A key difference between a psychopath and a sociopath is whether he has a conscience, the little voice inside that lets us know when we’re doing something wrong, says L. Michael Tompkins, EdD. He's a psychologist at the Sacramento County Mental Health Treatment Center.

A psychopath doesn’t have a conscience. If he lies to you so he can steal your money, he won’t feel any moral qualms, though he may pretend to. He may observe others and then act the way they do so he’s not “found out,” Tompkins says.

A sociopath typically has a conscience, but it’s weak. He may know that taking your money is wrong, and he might feel some guilt or remorse, but that won’t stop his behavior.

Both lack empathy, the ability to stand in someone else’s shoes and understand how they feel. But a psychopath has less regard for others, says Aaron Kipnis, PhD, author of The Midas Complex. Someone with this personality type sees others as objects he can use for his own benefit.

Sound like anyone you know... from the TV? Baker began his column by noting that earlier in the week Señor Trumpanzee deals with the pandemic's impact through his connections with top executives of every stripe but the "one category that has yet to make his list: Americans who have lost someone to the pandemic." Baker noted that "Trump has led no national mourning. In his daily news conferences, he makes only perfunctory references to those who have died as he stiffly reads opening remarks, exhibiting more emotion when grieving his lost economic record than his lost constituents. Empathy has never been considered one of Mr. Trump’s political assets. He views public displays of sadness as weakness and has made a point of stressing resolve, even at the risk of overlooking the deep pain afflicting so much of the country. His favorite words in his televised appearances of recent weeks are 'powerful' and 'strong.' He talks of 'ncredible' days ahead without dwelling on the miserable days of now. He plans fireworks while Americans plan funerals.

The contrast with his predecessors could hardly be starker. President Ronald Reagan captured the emotions of the nation with his poetic eulogy to the crew of the space shuttle Challenger after it exploded. President Bill Clinton channeled the country’s anger and grief after the bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building 25 years ago.

President George W. Bush shed tears and shared hugs with the families of those killed on Sept. 11, 2001, and in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even the famously stoic President Barack Obama wept openly after the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., and sang “Amazing Grace” at a service for black churchgoers killed by a white supremacist in Charleston, S.C.





...Other presidents considered the mourner in chief role part of their duties, a responsibility to help a nation grappling with tragedy by acknowledging its grief and finding a path forward. Craig Shirley, a longtime Republican operative and Reagan biographer, said presidents like Reagan, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt connected with everyday people because their self-confidence “gave them the power to exhibit compassion and empathy.”

“It takes a strong man to open his heart,” Mr. Shirley added. “But it also makes a very good and memorable president.”

Few had more experience with that than Roosevelt, who came to office at the depths of the Great Depression when millions were out of work, then presided over World War II with hundreds of thousands of young men sacrificing for their country.

“In virtually all of F.D.R.’s talks, he played a pastoral role,” said Susan Dunn, a Williams College professor and an author of several books on Roosevelt. “He was always empathetic, and even when he was talking about economic dislocation, unemployment, etc., he introduced spiritual notes.”

In recent times, Mr. Bush found himself repeatedly called to comfort a nation beset by terrorism, war, natural disaster and financial collapse. Days after Sept. 11, he stopped by the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York to meet with relatives of those killed in the attacks. He was supposed to visit for a half-hour but stayed for two hours and 20 minutes, hugging and talking with hundreds of devastated people in encounters that were so heart-wrenching that aides and even Secret Service agents cried.

“He was really passionate about connecting with people especially because he took this type of tragedy so personally,” said Eric Draper, the White House photographer who accompanied him. “He used that passion to express his remorse and sadness, but also to connect with people to make them feel better. He would say it wasn’t about him. It was about the presidency and he wanted to share the presidency with them.”

Mr. Obama contended with a series of mass shootings and racial episodes that tore at the country. After the children were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Jon Favreau, his chief speechwriter, found the president in the Oval Office struggling to hold his composure, a grief that Mr. Obama then displayed moments later on camera in the briefing room with tears streaming down his face.

“In five years of watching him, I’ve never seen Trump display a shred of empathy or grace towards another human being,” Mr. Favreau said. “I’m not sure he has that capacity, at least he’s never shown it in public.”

Trump Targets Californians For Reprisals-- Californians Will Defeat More Republicans In 2020, Including Him

Active Shooter by Nancy Ohanian

Going into 2018, there were 14 Republicans in California's delegation to Congress, including 4 in Orange County alone. When the new Congress was sworn in, there were no longer any Republicans representing Orange County and the Republicans in the statewide delegation had been halved. Gone were Jeff Denham, David Valadao, Steve Knight, Ed Royce, Mimi Walters, Dana Rohrabacher and Darrell Issa, all of whom had been targeted by Ted Lieu, then DCCC vice chair for the West Coast. Worse yet, the small margins by which many of the others had managed to hold on, indicate that California will very likely lose more Republican congressmen next year. Duncan Hunter, Devin Nunes, Tom McClintock and Doug LaMalfa are all dangerously vulnerable.

Is it fair to blame these losses on Trump, which is exactly what most congressional Republicans and their allies do-- at least in public? "He's like an anchor around our necks," one GOP campaign staffer told me in confidence this morning. "If we stand up to him, we're in danger of losing the base. If we go along with some of his preposterous bullshit, independent voters associate us with him-- and they really hate him... Here in California, there's a growing perception that he is targeting the state for retribution and that's going very badly for us."

On Thursday, Politico published an essay by Michael Grunwald, Trump's War On California. This is what the state's shrinking pool of Republican elected officials have to live with-- starting with his constant bashing of the state. That he targets Democrats like Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Maxine Waters, the governor etc. with immature nicknames, hurts the party brand among independent voters-- and remember, in California, the GOP has fewer registered voters than people who have registered as independents.

Trump and his cronies, points out Grunwald, "have begun framing 2020 as a last stand against the hippie-lefty Californication of America. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk has warned that 'Democrats want California to be the blueprint for America,' while Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, has suggested that Trump’s reelection slogan should be: 'I’m not going to let the Democrats turn America into California.'"

California has earned its reputation as the politically correct capital of Blue America, a heavily urban majority-minority coastal state where it’s legal to smoke pot but illegal for retailers to provide plastic bags or cops to ask suspects their immigration status. Taxes are high, the first year of community college is free and driver’s licenses have a third option for residents who don’t identify as male or female. But while California has plenty of problems, from worsening wildfires to overpriced housing to that troubled bullet-train project that became the latest target of presidential mockery, there’s one serious hitch in the GOP plan to make California a symbol of Democratic dysfunction and socialistic stagnation: It’s basically thriving.

“California is doing awesome,” says Congressman Ted Lieu, an immigrant from Taiwan who co-chairs the policy and communications committee for the House Democratic Caucus. “It’s a beautiful, welcoming, environmentally friendly place that proves government can work. Who wants to run against that?”

California is now the world’s fifth-largest economy, up from eighth a decade ago. If it’s a socialist hellhole, it’s a socialist hellhole that somehow nurtured Apple, Google, Facebook, Tesla, Uber, Netflix, Oracle and Intel, not to mention old-economy stalwarts like Chevron, Disney, Wells Fargo and the Hollywood film industry. California firms still attract more venture capital than the rest of the country combined, while its farms produce more fruits, nuts and wine than the rest of the country combined. During the Great Recession, when the state was mired in a budget crisis so brutal its bond rating approached junk and it gave IOUs to government workers, mainstream media outlets were proclaiming the death of the California dream. But after a decade of steady growth that has consistently outpaced the nation’s, plus a significant tax hike on the wealthy, California is in much sounder fiscal shape; while federal deficits are soaring again, the state has erased its red ink and even stashed $13 billion in a rainy day fund.

Of course, every state is in better economic shape than it was during the Great Recession, but California has enjoyed its renaissance while pursuing policies Republicans associate with economic ruin. It has an $11-an-hour minimum wage, scheduled to rise to $15 by 2023. Its unusually aggressive implementation of Obamacare since 2013 has reduced its uninsured rate from 17 percent to just 7 percent. Its ambitious clean energy and climate policies in many ways inspired the Green New Deal; the state is committed to generating 50 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 and 100 percent by 2045, and its stringent fuel-efficiency standards help explain why it’s home to half the nation’s electric vehicles.

In general, California is flourishing while pursuing the exact opposite of the policies Trump is pursuing in Washington. And it has sued the Trump administration dozens of times, not only taking the lead on the new 16-state lawsuit against the president’s emergency wall declaration, but fighting for loan forgiveness for students defrauded by for-profit schools, net neutrality and Obamacare’s guarantees of free birth control, while fighting to stop the ban on travel from several Muslim countries, the ban on transgender service members, and a slew of environmental rollbacks. For example, Trump is trying to dismantle California’s strict fuel-efficiency rules, which have become de facto national rules since other blue states have adopted them and every automaker has complied with them, and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra is now battling the administration in court to protect them.

“If people want to call what California is doing socialism, fine, but it isn’t having a negative impact on the economy,” says political scientist Chris Hoene, executive director of the California Center for Budget and Policy. “By just about every measure of productivity, we’re at the upper end of the spectrum.”

That hasn’t stopped Republicans from making California their go-to nightmare scenario. In 2018, Senator Ted Cruz warned that liberals wanted Texas to be “just like California, right down to the tofu and silicone and dyed hair.” Democratic candidates for governor were accused of trying to turn Nevada and Florida into California, and Colorado into “RadiCalifornia.” In the Georgia governor’s race, Republican Brian Kemp’s stump-speech mantra about Democrat Stacey Abrams was that she was trying to import “radical California values.” The Republican National Committee’s nickname for Harris in its news releases is “California Kamala,” and it rarely mentions her without mentioning her “San Francisco values.”

California is so gigantic that it’s hard to pinpoint what its values really are. There are huge differences between its cities, exurbs, and rural areas, between crunchy Northern California and glam Southern California, between upscale coastal California and downscale inland California. But it’s undeniably a socially and politically progressive state, with laws banning pet stores from selling dogs that weren’t rescued, restaurants from giving their customers plastic straws unless asked, and employers from asking job applicants about their current salaries. Even the traditionally Republican suburbs of Orange County voted Democratic in 2018. And while economic conservatives consider its high-tax, pro-regulation policies “anti-business,” researchers have not found evidence that those policies drive businesses to other states or squelch innovation in California, although they do seem to encourage some retirees to move elsewhere. The president tweets on a platform created in California. It’s somewhat odd to portray the state that created health clubs, blue jeans, Pandora and Hulu as Venezuela in the making.

In fact, the secret sauce of the California dream seems to have something to do with attracting entrepreneurs who want to change the world as well as their bank accounts. Christine Moseley, the CEO of a San Francisco business-to-business startup called Full Harvest, was an executive for a global logistics conglomerate and then an organic juice chain before moving to the Bay Area to start an eco-friendly company of her own. She ended up developing a kind of Airbnb for ugly produce, a platform that connects farmers who have fruits and vegetables they can’t sell to grocery stores with juice companies and other buyers who don’t care what the food looks like as long as it’s fresh. America wastes about 40 percent of its food, contributing to global hunger as well as global warming; in three years, Full Harvest has sold 10 million pounds of produce that would have gone to waste.

“California was the perfect place to do this,” Moseley says. “It’s the tech and innovation capital of the world, but it’s also the place for people who care about food and the environment, and the place for people who want to solve big problems.”

A lot of those dreamers come to California from abroad; more than 10 million of the state’s 40 million residents are immigrants, and a quarter of those immigrants are undocumented. “There is a Revolution going on in California,” Trump tweeted during the legal battle over sanctuary cities last April, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment. In his Oval Office address about his border wall last month, the president pointedly cited two murders committed by undocumented immigrants in California, and earlier this week he complained on Twitter this week that California is leading the fight against his declaration of a national emergency.

But illegal border crossings into California are at their lowest level since 1971, and the state government doesn’t view its undocumented residents as a threat. They’re eligible for driver’s licenses, subsidized health care for their kids, and in-state tuition rates, while police officers are prohibited from working with ICE to try to deport them. University of California Chancellor Janet Napolitano, who ran the Department of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama, created legal services centers throughout the system to help undocumented students.

“California recognizes their basic humanity,” says Kevin Johnson, dean of the University of California-Davis law school. “And if you look at the labor market, immigrants are a big reason why California has such a dynamic economy.”

Traditionally, another reason has been government investment; for example, the strength of its public universities helped attract the aerospace industry, build the technology mecca of Silicon Valley, and turn the San Diego area into the national capital of “precision medicine.” But government also helped finance the ill-fated solar manufacturer Solyndra, as well as the beleaguered San Francisco-to-Los Angeles bullet train that Governor Newsom tapped the brakes on last week. Newsom is also scaling back a similarly massive water project designed to alleviate droughts and protect the Sacramento River delta. Sometimes Republicans cite misleading statistics to make California look bad-- yes, it has the “most debt” and the “most families on welfare,” because it has the most people-- but sometimes, California’s dreams have exceeded its government’s ability to execute them.

...[T]he idea of California as a leftist hellhole is likely to persist. “California is going to hell in a handbasket,” Fox News personality Tomi Lahren declared during a recent segment on the border. A conservative Town Hall columnist, in a 2018 essay titled “To Hell With California,” urged the state to secede from the U.S., although he said he didn’t want to nuke it. (“Well … OK, I don’t.”) There’s already a Twitter meme proposing a new Harris campaign slogan: “Make America California.”

California does feel like a potential harbinger of a more multicultural, more progressive American future, which may be one reason Trump is so openly hostile to it, even threatening to withhold aid from its wildfire victims. A lot of Newsom’s plans for California are to counter what’s happening in Washington; he wants to reinstate Obamacare’s individual health insurance mandate in California, extend health subsidies to undocumented adults in California, and pursue even more ambitious climate goals. Meanwhile, the Democratic candidates to take on Trump are pushing platforms that would take a lot of California policy to the national stage.

The story of California is the story of America-- immigration, innovation, investing in what works,” Lieu said. “Plus we’ve got amazing beaches, and Disneyland! How cool is that?”

This is just the kind of anti-California jidahist sentiment from Trump that drives Californians up the wall. The people who suffered from the catastrophic wild fires in the northeast of the state were Democrats, Republicans and independents. Trump's lack of empathy for their plight stings-- and is unprecedented for an American president. The local congressman, Republican Doug LaMalfa, a Trump enabler, seems scared to offend Trump to stand up for his own constituents. When Trump threatened to take away funds from fire victims, LaMalfa refused to take a stand and just told the people who put him in office to trust Trump. 

The progressive Democrat who nearly beat him last time and plans to finish the job this time, Audrey Denney, doesn't trust Trump-- or LaMalfa. About a week ago she reminded us that her home county "was ravaged by the most deadly and destructive wildfire in California’s history. We are still reeling from the effects of the fire. Around 30,000 people have been displaced. Many residents have moved away permanently because there is no available housing to accommodate them. We are mourning the loss of 85 of our community members.  Residents are grappling every day with how to piece their lives back together when everything they had was taken away traumatically and instantly. Homeowners are grappling with whether or not to rebuild, where to live in the coming years, and wondering how they will ever get fire insurance again. Renters across our county, myself included, are having to move in with friends because there are no rentals available and the pre-fire housing crisis in Butte County is exponentially worse now... My question is this: Where is our President’s empathy? How can his conscience allow him to use the citizens of Butte County as pawns in his political war? The lives and livelihoods of Americans must come before his partisan political games. Recovering from this disaster is going to take billions of dollars and many years-- we need help-- and we need leaders who will fight for us. The recovery of our communities is entirely dependent on receiving this Federal disaster funding. This is not the time for the President to cause more uncertainty while we try and move forward. This is not the time for our Congressman Doug LaMalfa to be content to stand by idly while his constituents are further harmed and traumatized by these political games."

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

A simple question for us all: Can you imagine yourself needing crib notes when you encounter someone who has lost a dear friend or loved one in a hail of bullets? Even their child! I doubt that you are that devoid of empathy for others. Only the worst examples of humanity are. Clearly, Donald J. Trump is one of those.

On Wednesday, Trump, held a little pretend-you-care get together in the oval office. His staff, or at least someone on his staff, knows what they have for a boss. However, the horrific circumstances in Parkland Florida and the national reaction to them forced the White House to do more than what their boss had done over the weekend (a quick, obviously reluctant visit with some of the kids, a now infamous joking, thumbs up smily face, photo op with some local police, and then a night of champaign guzzling and happy disco dancing at his Mar-a-lago resort, followed by some golfing during the funerals after saying he would honor the victims by not doing so). Hence, the need for the White House get together. Trump took some time off from blaming the victims and the Mueller investigation to hold the meeting, but someone who works for him knew he'd better have some handy little empathy buzz phrases ready. I call it Empathy For Dummies.

Trump needed some of that "empathy thing" just like George H.W. Bush once asked how he could get some of that "vision thing." The difference, though, was that Bush was self-aware whereas Trump has no sense of humanity. So, Trump's handlers gave him a piece of paper, a cue card, and they held their breath while they hoped that he wouldn't say anything insane. "Stick to this script, Mr. President. This isn't tweeting. These people are victims, real victims, right in front of you. Just refer to your notes here." So, there he sat, looking uncomfortable and unpresidential. He looked like a man who couldn't wait to get the meeting over with. Stupidly, he held the piece of paper for all the world to see, not that it revealed anything we didn't already know. We already know that Trump is incapable of empathy. Being incapable of empathy for others is at the top of the list for being a psychopath. It's not at the top of the list for being a president, even though presidents often have to make decisions that will cause their fellow humans to die. Having empathy helps a president make difficult decisions. Being a psychopath enables senseless tragedies.

Perhaps, one of the attendees at the oval office meeting had the best comment of all. When Stoneman Douglas student shooting survivor Sam Zeif was asked if he felt he was heard at the White House, he replied:

"I know I was heard because I saw it on Trump's little card."

Is there Such A Thing As A Racist With Empathy?

Yesterday, Paul Ryan was on MSNBC-- not with one of their normal anchors, but with far right resident loon Hugh Hewitt. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they decided Trump has sympathy for the victims of the hurricanes. "I have talked to him about these things," said Ryan. "He has tremendous compassion... He is flying to these emergencies as soon as he can without jeopardizing responses. He is stopping what he's doing. We have talked about the supplementals, these issues. The people who are suffering from these tragedies are in his mind front and center." Well, that isn't true. He golfed his way through the first week of the catastrophe in Puerto Rico, taking time out to call the victims lazy and to savagely attack the mayor of the island's biggest city. It's probably what inspired Jonathan Lemire and Julie Pace's moderately-worded AP headline yesterday: Expressing empathy remains a challenge for Trump. "As the death toll from the shooting in Las Vegas rapidly rose," explained Lemire and Pace, "White House officials urged President Donald Trump to show restraint in his response: No speculative tweets, please. No over-the-top bluster. White House chief of staff John Kelly encouraged a simple tweet of condolences. Aides wrote somber remarks that had Trump quoting scripture. Some around the president were encouraged to hear him connecting to the tragedy on a personal level-- talking about his property and calling friends there-- a sign he was taking in the impact of the event. The anxious counsel from his aides as Trump prepared to react to the largest mass shooting in U.S. history was a reminder of Trump’s troubled track record in such moments. Trump has often had difficulty embracing a central role of the American presidency: consoling people dealing with intense grief, regardless of their political affiliation or support for the White House’s agenda. It’s a quality that is rarely debated or analyzed on the campaign trail, yet one that can shape the way Americans view the success of their president." Kelly had good reason to be worried since Trump had already made a clown of himself in response to the catastrophe in Puerto Rico, primarily because Trump is a racist who has always had disdained for Puerto Ricans and has been hauled into court for refusing to rent federally-subsidized housing his company built to qualified Puerto Rican families. "Trump’s response to the devastation in Puerto Rico," they wrote, "has generated a raft of criticism."

In the first days after Maria, Trump was more focused on his feud with NFL players who were kneeling during the national anthem, blasting them in private to his allies and in public on Twitter. As images of the devastation in Puerto Rico began appearing more frequently on cable television, aides intensified their briefings, but Trump complained about the island’s debt and became fixated on the criticism from San Juan mayor’s, Carmen Yulín Cruz, according to three White House officials and outside allies.

Despite the scenes of devastation around Cruz, Trump decided to hit back on Twitter, ignoring advice from Kelly and homeland security adviser Tom Bossert to focus on the recovery.

The public has been watching.

Just 32 percent of Americans approve of how Trump has handled disaster relief in the U.S. territory, while 49 percent disapprove, according to a poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. On Thursday, Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) called Trump’s visit to the island an insult.

“When we see the president of the United States go to Puerto Rico throwing toilet paper, paper towels, what is that saying to the American people? It is an affront,” Lewis said.

The president, however, believed his trip to Puerto Rico on Tuesday went well, according to a person who spoke with him after the visit. And friends say Trump, an unconventional president by any measure, was simply handling the situation in his own way.

“I think he’s an old school John Wayne-type guy who doesn’t like to wear emotions on his shirtsleeves,” said Chris Ruddy, a longtime friend of the president and the chairman of Newsmax. “He doesn’t cry in public and he doesn’t like men who do.”

Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz

After Trump’s bumpy response to the Puerto Rico hurricane, top aides, including Kelly, scripted out a more measured response for the president after the shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday, which left 58 people dead. Trump largely followed the game plan, including avoiding public speculation about the motive of the shooter in a city where he owns a hotel that sports his name in giant gold letters. Trump consulted several friends from the city, including casino magnate and mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, about his response. He told aides he wanted to salute the law enforcement personnel he believes prevented the massacre from being worse.

Trump often struggled as a candidate to exude the kind of empathy that comes naturally to some politicians. In the summer of 2016, aides tried repeatedly to explain to Trump why his attacks on Khizr Khan, a Muslim-American whose son was killed fighting for the U.S. military in Iraq, were off-putting to so many voters. One former campaign official said Trump was unmoved by arguments about the sacrifices Khan’s family had made for the country and couldn’t get past the fact that Khan had spoken out against the Republican nominee at the Democratic Party’s convention.

His staff tried to limit small, potentially emotional gatherings with supporters, knowing that Trump preferred the distance of a large, roaring crowd. In October, as he made a last-minute push to win Florida, advisers prepped Trump about the gut-wrenching story of Miriam de la Pena, whose son’s plane was shot down by the Cuban government in 1996, according to another former campaign staffer.

But Trump was far more focused on the endorsement he was set to receive later that day and, as de la Pena choked up recounting her tale, his eyes wandered around the room, only turning to say “very sad story” when the tearful mother finished speaking.

Former advisers say Trump also appears to lack any understanding of the impact his often sharp-tongued tirades can have on aides. One adviser recalled being berated by Trump in the Oval Office, in front of multiple colleagues, in particularly humiliating fashion. The next day, Trump called the adviser on the phone and started joking as though the previous day’s outburst had never happened.