Why MAGA Has No Empathy

Ask a MAGA supporter to care about someone else’s suffering. Don’t argue with them. Don’t challenge their politics. Just ask them to feel something for another human being who is in pain. Then watch what happens.

They won’t feel guilty for not caring. They won’t go quiet. They’ll get angry. At you. For asking.

In 2020, researcher William Laughey at Hull York Medical School published a study in Medical Science Educator that identified something he called empathic dissonance. Laughey was studying empathy in clinical settings, working with medical students who were being asked to express care for patients they didn’t genuinely feel connected to. What he found was that when people are pressured to demonstrate empathy they don’t actually feel, the result isn’t guilt or shame. It’s discomfort. The gap between what they’re supposed to feel and what they actually feel creates a friction that turns outward. The person who asked becomes the problem.

Laughey coined the term in a medical context. But the mechanism he described runs far deeper than a hospital consultation room. It describes what happens inside any person when the world expects them to feel something and they can’t. The expectation itself becomes the threat. And the person who made the expectation visible becomes the target.

This is MAGA’s entire emotional architecture.

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The Pattern

Children separated from their parents at the border. You bring up the children and MAGA doesn’t grieve for them. They attack you for mentioning them. They tell you the parents shouldn’t have come. They tell you the kids are being used as props. They change the subject to crime statistics. Anything, any direction the conversation can go that isn’t “those children are suffering and that should bother us.”

A classroom full of children shot to death. You grieve with the parents and MAGA attacks the parents. They accuse them of being crisis actors. They accuse them of wanting to take guns away. They turn the people who lost their children into the enemy because the alternative is feeling something for a dead child and they can’t do it.

People losing their healthcare. You express concern and they tell you those people should have worked harder. They don’t engage with the suffering. They assign blame to the person suffering so they don’t have to sit with the fact that another human being is in pain and they feel nothing about it.

The pattern is always the same. You ask them to care. They attack you for asking. Every single time.

Why Dissonance, Not Disagreement

The instinct is to interpret this as a political disagreement. They don’t care about immigrant children because they have a different view on immigration policy. They don’t grieve school shootings because they have a different view on gun rights. They don’t worry about healthcare because they have a different view on government spending.

That interpretation is wrong, and the reason it’s wrong is the anger.

If this were a policy disagreement, the response would be a policy argument. “I think the border should be handled differently.” “I think gun rights are important.” “I think healthcare should be market-based.” Those are positions. You can have those positions calmly. You can hold them while still acknowledging that a child in a cage is suffering, that a dead first-grader is a tragedy, that a person who can’t afford insulin is in pain.

But that’s not what happens. What happens is rage. The question “don’t you feel bad for those kids?” produces not a policy response but a hostile one. Because the question isn’t really about policy. The question is about capacity. Can you feel this? And for people who can’t, that question is an exposure. It reveals something about them that they spend their entire lives trying to hide.

Laughey’s empathic dissonance describes exactly this mechanism. The friction between what you’re expected to feel and what you actually feel doesn’t produce introspection. It produces hostility toward whoever made the gap visible. The person who asked you to care becomes the enemy because they just demonstrated, in front of everyone, that you can’t.

The Research That Goes Deeper

Laughey identified the mechanism. Other researchers have mapped the personality.

A study published in 2025 in the Journal of Research in Personality surveyed more than 9,000 participants and found that Trump supporters consistently scored lower on affective empathy, which is the emotional capacity to feel what another person is feeling. They also scored higher on what the researchers called dissonant empathy, which is not discomfort with being asked to care. It is the experience of enjoyment when watching someone else suffer.

That finding is worth sitting with. Not indifference to pain. Pleasure in it.

In 2021, researcher Joshua Hart at Union College published a study in the Journal of Social Psychology demonstrating that narcissism functions as an upstream personality variable that predicts Trump support. Narcissists scored higher on social dominance orientation, the belief that some groups of people deserve to be on top and others deserve to be on the bottom. They scored higher on right-wing authoritarianism, the preference for obedience, conformity, and punishment of anyone who deviates. And they scored higher on anti-immigrant hostility. The narcissism came first. The politics came after.

Aleksandra Cichocka at the University of Kent found in 2018 that narcissists reject democracy itself. They prefer strong leaders and military rule because democracy requires something narcissists are structurally incapable of: the recognition that other people’s views are as valid as