Trump has ‘Empathy Deficit’? No, he reflects our massive ‘Empathy Fatigue’

In its never-ending proselytizing of the loony Tucson faithful, the desert encampment’s newsrag, the Arizona Daily [Red] Star, recently featured a piece of pseudo-psychoanalysis from (of course), a DC-based shrink, Russell Shilling, entitled, “Trump’s Empathy Deficit is Disqualifying” (his title cribbed from standard Leftist agitprop nationally).

At any rate, this hits a personal hot-button for me, and not as a kind of raving Trumpista (I’m not). 

It segues to something many have increasingly noticed about the ‘Old Pueblo’.  In my near 50 years in the American West, I’ve never lived in a place that has so many charities as the Tucson Metro.  And it seems like every time I turn around there’s a new one, begging money.  Charities are the one area in Tucson that is truly a growth industry.

If you cannot do anything else in your bored retirement, go find some downtrodden group here or there, create a charity or takeover & expand one that is undernourished.  At some point, you can host a big shindig  or soiree, and get pixs of everyone standing around and looking sooooo self-satisfied.

Classic liberal cocktail-hour behavior; frequently highlighted in Tucson’s meager, surviving glossy magazine-media…..”See what good people we are, we gave all this $$$ to such-and-such (the pooooor, little people, this-or-that noble cause), and are having our pictures taken to highlight our goodness (and wealth).”

And I have to admit, given the near impossibility of anything actually getting done in Tucson, this is probably all they got left.

Of course, on a deeper psychological scale, it’s been a major aspect of Hard-left propaganda, manipulating the well-to-do with charities for decades.  The great Russian-American conservative Ayn Rand frequently wrote about the psychology behind it.  It was the central, subtle theme in her depiction of the character Ellsworth Toohey, the demonic socialist media-editor, who worked for the clueless newspaper magnate Gail Wynand, in Rand’s masterpiece, The Fountainhead.

Yet Trump, the builder-developer, turns all of this charitable empathy bullsh*t on its head.  His very existence to the Hard-Left screams, “I don’t need your charity; I create”.  

In Rand’s Fountainhead, the central character, architect Howard Roark, has a more mild-mannered personality, something definitely not a feature of Trump’s rough-and-tumble NYC real estate background.  Rand modeled Roark after American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, considered our 2^nd greatest practitioner after Thomas Jefferson.   All the more reason the Left despises the braggadocious Mr. Trump.

But like a Howard Roark, Trump’s style begs the questions that all business contributors, especially to Tucson’s many charities should consider:  

Is not your ‘creation’ here enough?  Have you not “given back to the community” by employing people who support families, pay the outrageous taxes (for what’s received), obeyed the law, raised their kids right, bought houses, cars, and groceries?  Did these people take the risks you have to make things possible?

As Ayn Rand warned, the American (& Tucson) Hard-Left hates anyone who can reframe the questions this way. 

“Empathy deficit?” Hardly, more like ‘empathy fatigue’ for those of us who are constantly told, that we too are like Trump if we call bullsh*t on this clever psychological manipulation by the Hard-Left.

Sellers is a Southpark, Roosevelt-Republican (TR) living in incorporated Oro Valley; his background is federal technology commercialization