Empathy

A little goes a long way, but our leaders--elected and unelected--are short on even a little

It may seem virtually impossible to readers of this column, but half of the American public has no idea how much destruction Donald Trump and Elon Musk have caused already. There’s a story about a manufacturer, Mana Nutrition, in rural Fitzgerald, Georgia: Its 100 employees make the life-giving peanut paste that saves 1.2M children every year who would otherwise die of malnutrition. The destruction of USAID, our seven-decade old “soft-power” offering to the world isn’t about money. Our total foreign aid spend is less than 1% of the federal budget.

Elon Musk, the unelected billionaire making and implementing these “cost-cutting” initiatives wants us to know that empathy is killing the West. Musk, a guy with Autism Spectrum Disorder, a hallmark of which is the inability to empathize, goes a step further, telling us empathy is a weakness. I guess that if money is all that matters to you, that might be true, but it sounds very cynical. I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde, who said, “A cynic knows the cost of everything, but the value of nothing.” Must it be said that there is intrinsic value in saving children from starvation?

Only a lack of empathy combined with no sense of history could cause us to abandon our natural, long-term, allies in favor of a corrupt and murderous dictator like Vladimir Putin. Europe will pull together and do their best to keep Russia at bay, but having the U.S. surrender Ukraine tells Putin he can advance on Scandinavia, the Baltics, Poland, and other Eastern European countries that he needs to put his vision of a reborn Soviet Union back together. I thought this was a Humpty Dumpty, but it’s beginning to look like Putin’s got all the King’s horses and all the King’s men, and that they might just put Humpty Dumpty back together again. We won’t resist.

Canada, one of our oldest—and closest—allies will not take these ridiculous tariffs lying down. (Ridiculous because Trump’s cover story is that fentanyl and illegal immigrants are forcing him to declare that our nearest and dearest friend—one that has sent soldiers to die alongside Americans in every war we’ve ever fought—is an enemy that should be absorbed by us as our 51st state. On its face, it just looks like imperial expansionism. What else, short of syphilitic madness, could explain such behavior?

Just another broken promise to file with Trump’s spoken desire to reclaim the Panama Canal and taking over Greenland from our European ally, Denmark. Add it to the biggest casualty of Trump’s disloyalty and complete lack of ethics in abandoning Ukraine, a country we convinced to surrender its nukes by guaranteeing its security. No other country will ever believe us. With our signature on treaties now worthless, both Germany and Japan will feel compelled to pursue nuclear weapons for their defense. Proliferation will be the order of the day, and just like that, eighty years of stable peace in Europe and Asia are out the window.

We haven’t even begun to discuss the domestic impact of taking a meat cleaver to the ranks of National Park rangers, disease monitoring by the CDC, cancer research at the NIH, and climate modeling at NOAA. To paraphrase Steely Dan, the things they think are worthless I can’t understand.

Elon Musk may be the poster child for zero empathy, but his enabler, Donald Trump, is also a five-star degrader who fakes sincerity better than Musk, but is just as morally bankrupt.

Why would we fire the senior officer corps of the military, dismantle the Judge Advocate Corps (the lawyers who prosecute malfeasance in the armed services), cancel our climate research, and consciously decide to pull back from the world and let it dissolve into hunger, disease, petulance, and territorial war?

A total lack of empathy—and greed—that’s why.

I’m uncertain as to whether his minions in the Republican House and Senate really agree, or are just going along out of fear of retribution. Either way, this is what partisan gerrymandering buys you: a flaccid, coopted Congress.

Don’t ask if this is what nearly half of Americans voted for? That’s the wrong question. The right one is, do they know about the destruction being wrought in their names? I maintain they have no idea. The right-wing media ecosphere that has Fox News at its center, and myriad podcasts, YouTube videos, radio shows, web-streamers, TikToks, X, and Facebook posts as it constellations, never reveals any of these awful truths. The betrayals and the economic tomfoolery is completely unknown to them. And that is exactly the way Trump and the oligarchs want it.

I’m reminded that neither Caligula nor Nero had any empathy, either. Next, we’ll be treated to Kid Rock fiddling as the Kennedy Center burns.

©2025 Jon Sinton