Donald Trumphis Sunday rally in New York Madison Square Garden it was just the latest of the many hate-fests that have marked not only his campaign this year, but perhaps his entire history as an American political figure. Reading Bulwark’s report, I stopped when I hit the words “Tucker Carlson.” It was enough.

I went back, though, and read more mainstream articles looking for a mention of any emotion that wasn’t somehow related to hate, fear, or prejudice. I didn’t find one. Of course, I didn’t expect to find any of the normal things usually missing from discussions of Trump and his minions—empathy, humility, kindness. I knew a Trump rally would be a desert when it came to any weakness of MAGA and its dear leader.

Still, I was looking for even a hint of the strength needed to feel pain. I saw a story in Popular Mechanics, of all places, about the 17,000-year-old skeletal remains of a child who was discovered in 1998 in southern Italy buried in a cave in Monopoli, a city on the Adriatic Sea. Recent DNA analysis of the remains revealed that the child died when he was about one year and four months old, likely from a birth defect called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a condition that causes the walls of one of the heart’s ventricles to thicken until they can’t. it pumps more blood enough to keep a body alive. So 15,000 years before the date that marks the beginning of our calendar, a really ancient man and woman had a child who probably died before he could walk or talk.

There are rock paintings in France depicting bison, other animals and people from this period, called the Upper Paleolithic. A cave in the foothills of the Pyrenees has a mural from several thousand years later, depicting a battle between humans using bows and arrows. So we know that in southern Europe there were human beings intelligent enough to record some of their lives, including the animals they hunted for food and at least one war fought between competing tribes. And now we know something about the depth of their pain. They were sufficiently distressed by the death of their child, that they took care to have him buried under two slabs of stone in a cave, where the depth and method of burial preserved his remains, so far as his teeth were retrieve along with enough other skeletons. material to make DNA analysis possible.

We can now say that we have a time, some 17,000 years into our human past, when sadness was felt by this grieving ancient couple. Someone, perhaps the father and mother themselves, or the father and another man, or the mother and another woman from their settlement on the Adriatic, carried the child’s body deep into a cave and lifted two heavy stone slabs and placed on top of the body. to mark the place where he was buried. These early humans took time out of days they probably spent mostly hunting and fishing for survival to do this work to record that their boy existed. Their work is proof of their desperation.

The ability to feel sadness is perhaps our most important emotion as humans. The death of a loved one, especially the death of a child, is so painful that people are motivated to do almost anything to prevent or stop it. Medicine may be said to have resulted from sadness; religions record pain by marking the death of holy figures; ceremonies and graves are the result of sorrow. To feel sorrow, to grieve, is the essence of what it means to be human.

I’ve seen the pain recorded and shared by Democrats at rallies. During her debate with Trump, Kamala Harris highlighted the stories of women who have suffered and died because of extremist anti-abortion laws that prevent emergency care when pregnancies fail or go wrong. Feeling sadness for the despair of women and men alike affected by these tragedies has become part of our politics as Democrats since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

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Jeffrey Goldberg reported in The Atlantic that Trump reneged on a promise to help pay for the funeral of a Hispanic soldier killed at Fort Sill. „Nu costă 60.000 de dolari să îngropi un nenorocit de mexican!” Trump told his chief of staff in a meeting at the White House. He then ordered that the funeral not be paid for. Trump disparaged dead soldiers at Arlington Cemetery. He refused to attend a memorial for soldiers killed in the First World War, calling them “losers”.

It’s not about his lack of empathy or disrespect for the military and soldiers killed in combat. The question is, where is his sadness?

The answer is obvious. Donald Trump has no sadness.

The ability to feel human sorrow, an emotion we now know is at least 17,000 years old, does not exist within the former president. The proof is in his words. It’s in his actions. On this evidence, the look on his face while spewing hate on the campaign trail is not human.