Conversely, no matter how many statistics confirm that immigrants are overwhelmingly law-abiding and commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans, anti-immigrant groups have been hugely successful in parading family members of specific victims whose death may (or on closer examination, may not) be caused by illegal immigrants. Yes, Trump uses such cases to manipulate our emotions, but by the same token, the groups, who for years have spouted phony statistics and bogus data to demonize immigrants, can claim to have successfully manipulated him.

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Likewise on Syria, Trump throughout the campaign decried the notion that we had any interest in Syria. The horde of immigrants was a threat, in his mind. Bashar al-Assad was better than the alternative, he insisted. Then came the pictures and the videos this week. You could tell how uncomfortable, repulsed even, he was. Asked whether the latest attack was a red line, he responded: “It crossed a lot of lines for me. When you kill innocent children, innocent babies — babies, little babies — with a chemical gas that is so lethal — people were shocked to hear what gas it was — that crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line. Many, many lines.” As he said the phrase “babies, little babies,” you could see his face contort with genuine revulsion. The specific images showing individual victims plainly moved him. ” And I will tell you, that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me — big impact. That was a horrible, horrible thing,” he said. “And I’ve been watching it and seeing it, and it doesn’t get any worse than that.”

To some degree, this is human nature. Joseph Stalin (who was responsible for the deaths of millions of Russians) said, “A million deaths is a statistic; one death is a tragedy.” Likewise, the world shrugs when 450,000 Syrians die but recoils in horror at the image of a victim of the Aleppo bombings, 5-year old Omran Daqneesh, caked in blood and dirt and sitting in an ambulance.

The bias in favor of individual cases over generalized data is more acute with Trump because he has so little understanding of or intellectual curiosity about the world. A man who tweets headlines from Fox News in place of reading briefing papers remains remarkably ignorant, easily moved by one image or one hard-luck case. He’s a tabula rasa of sorts, so when a dramatic image breaks through, it may be the only particularized knowledge he has of a given situation.

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In his thirst for approval and distorted self-image, Trump needs to be seen as beneficent (why else lie about charitable donations?). Accordingly, advisers, activists and commentators who want to appeal to his desire to be praised as some kind of humanitarian would do well to deal in the concrete, the particular. He’s unmoved by a statistic (24 million people will lose insurance) but may be greatly moved by the plight of a single person denied coverage.