On the very day in which a
health-care company’s executive collapsed in the Oval Office, with U.S.
President Trump being the only person in the group standing and looking away in
what looks like callous disregard instead of compassion or empathy, that
president directed his Administration to appeal a federal judge’s ruling that
the U.S. Government had to immediately fund food-assistance, or SNAP (formerly “food stamps”)
completely for the month then more than a week in, in spite of the "government shutdown." On the next day, the Trump Administration demanded
that the member-states that had just paid out full November benefits to recipients
“undo" the difference between the partial and full amounts that had just been "paid out under judges’ orders” because the U.S.
Supreme Court “stayed those rulings.”[1]
The photo of Trump literally looking the other way while everyone else in the
Oval Office is bending over the collapsed man out of concern perfectly aligns
with his lack of concern for Americans going without food due to the sudden stoppage
of money for food without notice. That many employees of the U.S. Government who
had been laid off without pay since earlier that November would be especially
reliant on food-assistance money precisely because they were no longer obtaining
income (or else they were receiving unemployment compensation at less than full
pay) could be understood to be a matter of callousness rather than moral
sentiments from Trump simply by looking at the photo.
Looking at that photo, not even psychologists should conclude that a majority of the electoral (and popular) votes went to elect a psychopath. However, callousness in the face of a medical emergency can reasonably be inferred from the president’s non-verbal stance and emotionless facial expression. Had that photo been available to voters in the days before the 2024 presidential election, Trump may have lost that election. Such a hypothetical is useful ex post facto because it raises the question of whether so many voters as vote in a U.S. presidential election have enough actual information on the candidates. If the photo shocked many such voters just over a year after the 2024 election, the implication is that relying on “brand” marketing by presidential campaigns because so few voters even know people who know even just one of the candidates is deficient.
The Electoral College was
established in the U.S. Constitution not only because the member-states, like
those of the E.U., would retain some governmental sovereignty, but also because
with even just 7 million people voting for president, so few of them could be
expected to know the characters of the candidates beyond what reaches news print
that a check by electors who could meet the candidates was deemed to be
necessary. That the political parties captured the Electoral College such that
such a check did not in fact operate means that American representative democracy
as regards the federal president of the Union has been allowed to operate at a
deficiency, which is to say that the elections have been vulnerable to the
electorates (of the states) being misled by presidential campaigns.
In short, my point is that if even some of the millions of Americans who had voted for Donald Trump in November, 2024 were subsequently shocked a year later when they scrutinized the photo of Donald Trump being so visually inert emotionally, and perhaps even annoyed at the unwanted delay in his office, while antipodally the other people there could be seen as so obviously concerned about a guest who had just collapsed. Trump stood out so much from the others that even the president’s supporters could have been surprised, even marveling in the privacy of their own minds that they had known so little about Trump the man when they had voted for him. I am assuming that only a small minority of the electorate would favor voting for a person who at the very leeast appears to be so callous in person, for judgment, which involves not just reasoning, but also emotion, is salient in governing. The photo of Turmp in the Oval Office paradoxically demonstrates the importance of humane emotion in governance by so clearly dipicting the utter absence of emotion in a very human situation in which we would naturally expect to find spontaneous emotion. In this surreal way, Trump's repeated efforts to stop food-assistance from reaching the poor judicially and in policy can be grasped in terms of Trump as a person.
Perhaps as in the E.U., the chief executives of the U.S. member-states should nominate a candidate for federal president, with the U.S. House of Representatives, whose counterpart in the E.U. is the European Parliament, confirming or rejecting the candidate. The idea of the states' chief executives, who are themselves elected closer to the people, choosing the federal president outright was considered in the Constitutional Convention, but the proposal was unfortunately voted down in favor of the ill-fated Electoral College. The U.S. federal system can indeed be improved by borrowing some ideas from the E.U., and vice versa; this just takes some humility on both ends.
