MAGA is a Daycare for Adult Children

In the summer of 2025, psychologist Craig Neumann did something no researcher had done at this scale before. He measured the empathy profiles of over 9,000 American adults, mapped those profiles against their political affiliations and views of Donald Trump, and published what he found in the Journal of Research in Personality.

The results did not reveal what most people expected. The common assumption is that Trump supporters lack empathy, that something is missing, that there is a deficit or a gap where the ability to recognize and respond to suffering should be. That assumption is wrong, and what Neumann actually found is considerably worse.

Trump supporters are not blind to your pain. They can see it perfectly well. They enjoy it.

The Three Dimensions of Empathy

Understanding what Neumann’s data shows requires understanding that empathy is not a single capacity. It is at least three distinct psychological processes, each operating through different neural pathways, each measurable independently, and each telling a different story about how a person relates to the suffering of others.

Cognitive empathy is the ability to perceive and understand what another person is feeling. It is a perceptual skill, closer to reading comprehension than to emotional experience. A person with high cognitive empathy can look at someone’s face and know they are in pain. They can read body language, vocal tone, and social cues with accuracy. Cognitive empathy does not require caring about what you perceive. It only requires perceiving it.

Psychopaths typically score high on cognitive empathy. They are excellent at reading people. That is often what makes them effective manipulators. They can see exactly what you are feeling. They simply do not care.

Affective empathy is the capacity to feel what another person feels. It is the process by which observing someone else’s pain produces a corresponding emotional response in your own nervous system. When you see someone stub their toe and you wince, that is affective empathy. When a child cries and your chest tightens, that is affective empathy. It is automatic, involuntary, and operates below the level of conscious decision-making.

Affective empathy is what makes cruelty feel wrong. It is the internal alarm that fires when you witness suffering, the signal that tells your brain that what is happening to that person matters. Without it, the suffering of others is neutral information, the way a stock ticker is neutral to someone