Sad is a condition few people want to be in. Sadness on a massive scale is tragedy, according to the Greeks, who also gave us pathos. When our pity is accompanied by empathy or a desire to aid the sufferer, this is compassion. Sometimes, however, we pity the situation caused by a reprehensible action. What makes us sad is the lack of shame or contrition on the part of the perpetrator. This more or less is contempt—what Donald Trump elicits without breaking a sweat.

During his first presidential campaign, Trump obsessively used the Twitter refrain “Sad!” for anyone he wanted you to believe had gone down (Jeb!) and was therefore highly kickable. It’s interesting that Trump applied the exclamatory Sad! so frequently when he never seems to feel sad about any person or situation. When his 71-year-old brother died after an undisclosed illness on August 15, Trump released a statement: “It is with heavy heart I share that my wonderful brother, Robert, peacefully passed away tonight. He was not just my brother, he was my best friend. He will be greatly missed, but we will meet again. His memory will live on in my heart forever. Robert, I love you. Rest in peace.”

It’s easy to imagine Trump speaking the words “I love you,” which he tells his supporters all the time, but not “with heavy heart.” Saying that your heart is heavy admits to emotion, which implies a vulnerability that Trump sees as Sad! Within Trump’s enigmatic psyche, anger has pulled a home invasion on sad.

I’m surprised Trump’s branded word was not either pitiful or pathetic; they are both more brutal, suggesting denigration, someone looking down from above. Perhaps Sad! is Trump’s Room 101, making him refuse the reality of any situation that would make him feel that he’s looking down on himself. Not getting a thing that he wants is a loss that would inevitably lead to Sad! Thus, to divert any experience of loss, he reframes the facts (i.e., lies). While a normal human being would admit that her casino had failed miserably to turn the margin of profit to satisfy creditors, Trump seamlessly shifts his objective to getting out of paying for a colossal bungle. Instead of failing to manage a casino, he has succeeded in paying nothing for an astronomic loss. Instead of losing an election to Joe Biden, he has succeeded in refusing to concede the presidency. He is a winner, a patriot, a hero who immediately sells merchandise exulting in the reframed victory.

Trump has been diagnosed with the oratorial vocabulary of a third-grader (fourth if he’s speaking under oath), which is ironically the age when a typical child might be moving beyond the monosyllabic (“stop” and “steal,” for instance) to the polysyllabic (“Constitution,” “impeachment”). When he described reciting “person, woman, man, camera, TV” with such conviction (was this the only scientific procedure he’s ever appeared genuinely interested in?), I was reminded of those exercises where young children are shown a drawing of a face expressing emotion and asked to pick the word: glad, sad, or mad. You get the feeling that if Trump were shown a downturned mouth, he might undergo some elemental breakdown.

Early in Trump’s presidency, pundits likened him to P.T. Barnum, as both men built empires on reframing facts. But Barnum was successful at various enterprises, maintained a friendship with Tom Thumb, and opposed slavery, leaving the Democratic Party to join Lincoln’s Republicans. There was some aspect of “character” you could identify. Donald Trump, conversely, is more like a spectacle in Barnum’s American Museum. He has gone from curiosity to attraction to charismatic leader precisely because he is not one of us, whether you identify as a lover or loather of his authoritarian power grab. Unlike, say, the Elephant Man, whose core sensitivity summons our sadness and compassion, Trump is an alien being who cannot get emotionally hurt because of that pathological aversion to Sad! With his straw hair, spray-on face, and girdled obesity, you’d think that the millions who love him would have some corresponding pity, however unconscious. But his vigilant scorpionic presence is entirely the draw: he never needs to be advocated for. His MAGA base never need to get sad about him; he won’t tolerate it. You can only be mad or glad.

Much was made of Trump’s callously blowing off a cemetery visit on November 10, 2018, during events in France to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. He’d been scheduled to lay a wreath at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial, adjacent to Belleau Wood, where around 1,800 U.S. Marines died holding off a German advance toward Paris in 1918. Paris in 2018 was gray and drizzling, and the White House cited bad weather that grounded Trump’s helicopter. But everyone knew he could have found a way to travel those 60 miles. We know the typically selfish reasons he would not want to go, but I think there was an element of his Sad! aversion at play. He obviously didn’t care about dead soldiers or the sight of graves. But I think it unnerved him to be reminded that sacrifice and heroism have a human value unconvertible to cash, that he could neither own nor diminish that value. A cemetery is one of the few places where “Your money’s no good here” rings true.

Given the Constitution-inscribed plans for succession, being president is a good way to constantly think of your mortality You have to wonder if thoughts of his death in office would have the power to turn the weaponized Sad! into the real kind for Donald Trump. Although I’m sure he’d be repulsed by any bid to sit on the ground, I can imagine him being moved by the grandiosity of Shakespeare’s Richard II wanting to “tell sad stories of the death of kings”—

How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed,
All murdered.

Although he would have wedged “like a dog” in there somewhere, the pathos of in that litany—the melodrama of his own hypothetical persecution and demise from the pinnacle of glory—might be the one thing to make Trump legitimately sad.

Trumpism requires its adherents to maintain a contrarianism bordering on oppositional-defiant disorder, a pediatric emotional condition in which a child displays “a frequent and ongoing pattern of anger, irritability, arguing and defiance toward parents and other authority figures.” Sound familiar? “ODD also includes being spiteful and seeking revenge, a behavior called vindictiveness.” When Trump dies—or maybe I should say if Trump ever dies—I cannot imagine any of his followers mourning their imperial messiah. They will rampage t like Manchester United fans. They will vent their anger at reality, try to hurt it real bad.

Even as Trump continues his malevolent attempt to subvert democracy, it’s hard not to see the Sad! in his desperation, especially when the residents of Mar-a-Lago have stated their intention to sue if he moves back. Apparently he skipped the $1,200-ticket New Year’s Eve bash at his castle to return to Washington for some important consultation six days before Congress’s certification of the Electoral College results. His reptilian opportunists in the House and Senate have vowed to disrupt this process as Trump’s motley Stop the Steal brigade search among the nation’s ambulance chasers for an answer to their prayer.

As a child, I would get heartbroken hearing the Peter, Paul and Mary song “Puff the Magic Dragon.” You knew it was a setup by virtue of the word Magic, but what killed me was the line “So Puff, that mighty dragon, sadly slipped into his cave.” When no one wants you anymore, you have to slip into a cave that is yours and yours alone—and there is no way of doing so without doing it sadly. The alt-ending, of course—the Game of Thrones ending—is that you fight back fiercely, lashing out with your gigantic tail and leveling the whole of democracy in the process. Sad! §