Donald Has Never

Being an Inventory of the Ordinary Human Interior, Furnished Item by Item in the Rest of Us and Never Once in Him, From the Warmth of a Child's Smile to the Mercy of a Single Doubt

He has never had a profound moment. I want to be precise about the claim, because it is a large one and I am making it on purpose. Not a rare profound moment, not a profound moment buried under the noise of a loud life, not a profound moment he keeps private out of some unexpected reserve of dignity. There have been none of them at all. In nearly eighty years on the earth, through marriages and funerals and the births of his own children, through every doorway a long life walks a person through, he has never once stood still inside a moment and felt it open beneath him into something larger than himself. The interior room where that happens, the one the rest of us furnish slowly across a lifetime, was never built in him. He has the square footage. He simply never laid the floor.

He has never felt the particular warmth that arrives unbidden and unearned when a small child looks up and smiles at you for no reason at all, the warmth with no transaction in it, that asks for nothing and sells nothing and cannot be leveraged into anything, the involuntary softening in the chest that is the oldest and least sophisticated feeling our species owns. He has never felt it from a dog either, never had the absurd, uncomplicated lift of watching a tail go helpless with joy at the simple fact of your return, because that joy is a mirror and there was never anything in him for it to catch and throw back. He has stood near children his whole life, his own among them, and near dogs, and near every ordinary occasion of tenderness a person passes through in eight decades, and the tenderness has rolled off him the way water rolls off a sealed surface, beading and running and leaving no mark, soaking into nothing, because there was nothing underneath for it to soak into.

He has never cared about the feeling of another person. Not once, not as a lapse, not as a bad day, not as a man who cares underneath but was raised unable to show it, which is a real and forgivable kind of person and not remotely the kind I am describing. I mean the wiring itself. I mean that the entire apparatus by which one human registers the inner weather of another, the apparatus that makes you wince when a stranger trips on the sidewalk, that makes you lower your voice without deciding to in a hospital corridor, that makes you unable to fully enjoy a good thing while someone beside you is plainly suffering, was never installed in him, and its absence is not a wound he privately carries. It is a convenience he openly deploys. The rest of us are slowed everywhere, all day, by the felt reality of other people. He has never once been slowed.

He has never doubted that he was the smartest man in the room. Sit for a second with how strange that is, because doubt of precisely that kind is the engine of every real intelligence that has ever existed, the small cold draft of suspicion that you might be wrong, that the other person might know the thing you do not, that what you are certain of this morning might not survive the next sentence anyone speaks. Every person who has ever learned anything learned it through that draft. He has never felt it move across him. He has never walked out of a conversation quietly revising one item he walked in believing. He has never finished a book and been altered by it, has by every visible sign never finished a book at all, has never sat with a difficult idea long enough to feel it rearrange the furniture inside him, because rearrangement requires a self pliable enough to be rearranged, and his set like poured concrete before most of us had finished grade school. He has never said the words I was wrong and meant them in the private place where meaning actually lives. He has never needed to, because the need is downstream of the doubt, and the doubt was never there to begin with.

He has never been ashamed. Embarrassed, yes, loudly and litigiously, the wounded vanity of a man caught looking smaller than he insists the world agree he is. I am not talking about that. I mean shame, the real article, the quiet internal verdict that you have fallen short of the person you meant to be, which is the engine underneath every apology that was ever worth receiving. Shame requires a person you meant to be, an interior standard held up above the self and answered to in the dark. He has never held one up. He has never apologized and meant it. He has never lain awake at three in the morning rearranging a sentence he said to someone, because no someone has ever registered as real enough to cost him the sleep.

He has never stood at a graveside and felt the floor of the world give way, never been made small and silent by the sheer mass of his own grief, because grief at that weight requires having once loved another person more than you love yourself, and that particular sum has never resolved in anyone’s favor but his own. And he has never been awed. He has never stood under a hard field of stars or in front of a painting or at the lip of an ocean and felt the clean and welcome terror of his own smallness, the discovery that there are things immeasurably larger than you and that this is not a threat but a mercy, that the universe is not in fact arranged around the man currently looking at it. He needs it to be arranged around him. Awe is the precise experience of learning that it is not, and he has spent eighty years engineering his life so that the lesson never once arrives.

He has never had a friend. He has had useful people, and formerly useful people, and people who are useful at this exact moment and will be discarded the instant the use runs dry, the entire transactional carousel of a man for whom other human beings are instruments graded on the single axis of what they can do for him today. He has never been loyal to anyone at a cost to himself, never stood beside a person when standing there gained him nothing, because loyalty that costs you something is only empathy carried over a longer horizon, and the empathy was never there to carry that far. He has never laughed at a joke that was not at someone else’s expense, never felt the clean surprise of being wrong-footed by something simply and genuinely funny, because that surprise requires a momentary surrender of control, and he has never once surrendered control of anything, to anyone, for any reason, including joy.

Here is where the inventory stops being a sad list and becomes a frightening one. None of this is suffering. The rest of us are trained to read a catalog like this as tragedy, to feel the tug of pity for the man who has never known the warmth or the awe or the saving draft of doubt, to murmur about how empty and how lonely and how diminished he must secretly be. Resist the tug. He does not experience the absence as absence. He has never once missed the floor of that interior room, because he has never understood that anyone else was standing on one. What you and I would feel as a hole, he has always felt as a runway. Every soft and costly thing the rest of us carry, the empathy that slows us and the doubt that corrects us and the shame that restrains us and the awe that humbles us and the love that bankrupts us, is to him nothing but ballast he happened to be born without, and he has spent a long life watching the rest of the species stagger under that ballast and drawing the only conclusion available from inside his particular emptiness, which is that he is the strong one and we are the weak.

A country looked at a man with no interior weather, no floor in the inner room, no draft of doubt, no reflex of mercy, no ceiling of awe anywhere above him, and it did not recoil. It elected him, and then with its eyes fully open it elected him again. It looked at the exact hollowness this whole inventory has been describing and it called the hollowness strength, called the cruelty honesty, called the absence of doubt leadership, and it handed the one unrestrained man it could find the single job on the planet that runs on nothing but restraint. He has never had a profound moment. He now presides over one, the long slow profound catastrophe of a great country learning far too late that the empty room at the center of him was never going to furnish itself, and that everything it touches it hollows out to match.

He has never had a profound moment.

We are about to have ours.

^{Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP}

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