Donald Trumpthe Sunday gathering in New York Madison Square Garden was just the most recent of many hate-fests that have marked not only his campaign this year but arguably his entire history as an American political figure. While reading the Bulwark report, I stopped when I heard the words “Tucker Carlson.” It was enough.

However, I went back and read more mainstream news stories looking for any mention of any emotion that wasn’t connected in some way to hatred, fear or to prejudices. I didn’t find any. Of course, I didn’t expect to find the normal elements usually absent from discussions about Trump and his minions – empathy, humility, kindness. I knew a Trump rally would be a desert when it came to anything resembling what MAGA and its dear leader consider weakness.

Still, I searched for even a hint of the strength needed to feel grief. I saw a story in Popular Mechanics, among others, about the 17,000 year old skeletal remains of a child discovered in 1998 in southern Italy buried in a cave in Monopoli, a town on the Adriatic Sea. Recent DNA analysis of the remains revealed that the child died when he was about a year and four months old, likely from a birth defect called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a disease that causes the walls of one of the ventricles of the heart to thicken. heart until it can no longer pump enough blood to keep a body alive. So, 15,000 years before the date that marks the beginning of our calendar, a very ancient man and woman had a baby who probably died before he could walk or talk.

There are cave paintings in France depicting bison, other animals and humans from this era, called the Upper Paleolithic. A cave at the foot of the Pyrenees is home to a mural dating back thousands of years, depicting a battle between humans using bows and arrows. So we know that there were humans in southern Europe 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 the depth of their grief. They were so distressed by the death of their child that they ensured that he was buried under two stone slabs in a cave, where the depth and method of burial preserved his remains to the extent that his teeth were found with sufficient other skeletal remains. equipment to make DNA analysis possible.

We can now say that we have a date, some 17,000 years in our human past, when grief was felt by this ancient grieving 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 to the bottom of a cave and lifted two heavy stone slabs and placed them on the body. to mark the place where he was buried. These early humans took time, which they probably spent mostly hunting and fishing to survive, to do this work to record that their boy existed. Their work testifies to their desperation.

The ability to feel grief is perhaps our most important emotion as human beings. The death of a loved one, especially the death of a child, is so painful that humans are motivated to do almost anything to prevent or stop it. You could say that medicine is the result of grief; religions record grief by marking the death of holy figures; ceremonies and graves are the result of grief. Feeling grief, mourning, is the very essence of being human.

We saw the grief 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 in the event of a failed or poor pregnancy. Feeling sorrow at the despair of the women and men who have been 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 his promise to help pay for the funeral of a Hispanic soldier murdered at Fort Sill. “It doesn’t cost $60,000 to bury a fucking Mexican!” Trump reportedly told his chief of staff during a meeting at the White House. He then ordered that the funeral not be paid for. Trump denigrated the soldiers who died at Arlington Cemetery. He refused to attend a memorial for soldiers killed in World War I, calling them “losers.”

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

The answer is obvious. Donald Trump has no regrets.

The ability to feel human grief, an emotion we now know is at least 17,000 years old, does not exist in the former president. The proof is in his words. It’s in his actions. Clearly the look on his face as he spews hate on the campaign trail is not human.