Empathy won Joe Biden the White House, we were told. Indeed, as former Republican speechwriter Peter Wehner informed us, ‘In the entire history of American presidential campaigns, there may never have been a wider gap in empathy than between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.’ Sen. Chris Coons said Biden’s ‘ability to comfort and listen and connect with people who have just suffered the greatest loss of their lives’ is his ‘superpower’.
That fabled empathy hasn’t been much on display in the last fortnight, however. The president called the images coming out of Afghanistan during his disastrous withdrawal ‘heart-breaking’, but his own heart didn’t seem to be in it any time he said it.
Yet after a suicide bomber killed 13 American troops and hundreds of civilians at the Kabul airport Thursday, the nation might have expected — it certainly wanted — a statesman’s show of sensitivity. And Biden said he knew how the grieving families felt.
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