Donald Trump is almost totally immune to human suffering. But he is surprisingly affected by images of buildings collapsing. In an interview with Republican apparatchik Hugh Hewitt, Trump responds to questions about Israel by complaining, “They’re releasing the most heinous, most horrible tapes of buildings falling down.”
At no point in the interview does Trump refer to images of Palestinian people dying or starving. It is the damage to the buildings that unsettles him.
Trump made a similar comment about Ukraine earlier this year, saying, “People are killed and culture is destroyed. You will never be able to replace thousand-year-old buildings with the most beautiful golden domes and churches — now it’s all just collapsed.” This sentence does briefly refer to human death, but Trump zooms past it to linger on the harm to the structures.
Trump’s inability to muster genuine feelings about pain experienced by other people — with the partial exception of people suffering because they helped him — is a consequence of his undiagnosed narcissistic sociopathy. But it is slightly mitigated by his legacy as a developer, which has left him sensitive to the loss of commercial and residential assets. (Perhaps too much attention is paid to the possibility Trump will start a nuclear war, and too little to the possibility he would deploy a neutron bomb.)
The interview is otherwise notable for a handful of reasons. Hewitt twice prods Trump to say he is “100 percent with Israel,” but Trump declines to repeat the line Hewitt feeds him. (Trump has likely noticed that left-wing protesters are taking a chunk out of Joe Biden’s vote total and understands that refusing to be pinned down on the issue makes for better politics — which is not to say he will alter his Likudnik policy agenda if he wins.)
Asked whom he will choose as vice-president, Trump deflects the question to go on his umpteenth rant about how the election was stolen from him, to which Hewitt concurs:
Trump: … Will they do it again, meaning cheat? And that one’s a simple one. They’re going to try like hell. And we think we’ve got them checkmated, but we’ll see what happens. But it’s a disgrace. One way you win is if you just swamp them, you know? You swamp them, there’s nothing they can do. And that’s what I think is going to happen with this election.
Hewitt: Well, that was the title of a book I wrote 20 years ago. If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat. So just don’t make it close.
Hewitt did, indeed, write a book by that title. It is a reminder that Trump’s deranged claims of a stolen election did not spring fully formed from his own brain, but were nurtured in a soil cultivated by respectable Republicans who spread lies for years that Democrats routinely engage in wide-scale undetected vote fraud. Trump’s innovation was to believe and act on the lie rather than merely use it as agitprop to justify vote-suppression measures.
And then, when asked about debating Biden, Trump insisted the president had been on cocaine when he delivered the State of the Union address:
Trump: I don’t think so, but I hope he does. I think what happened is, you know, that white stuff that they happened to find, which happened to be cocaine in the White House, I don’t know, I think something’s going on there, because I watched this State of the Union, and he was all jacked up at the beginning. By the end, he was fading fast. There’s something going on there. I want to debate. And I think debates, with him, at least, should be drug-tested. I want a drug test.
Hewitt: Mr. President, are you suggesting President Biden’s using cocaine?
Trump: I don’t know what he’s using, but that was not, hey, he was higher than a kite. And by the way, it was the worst, it was the worst address I’ve ever seen, the State of the Nation. I’ll tell you, State of the Union, that’s not State of the Union, because he doesn’t represent us properly. That, I can tell you. But he’s obviously, he’s being helped some way, because most of the time, he looks like he’s falling asleep. And all of a sudden, he walked up there and did a poor job. But he was all jacked up.
Cocaine is the explanation Republicans gave for how a man they claimed was in a state of advanced dementia delivered a vigorous performance. It is interesting to see that this is where Trump’s mind went immediately when presented with a question about debating. Trump insists he will debate Biden because Biden is unable to stand erect and speak English. But he is already supplying excuses for when this fails to occur.
