These creatures have provided fleeting glimpses of the gentler side of the world’s most powerful person. (OK, maybe not the alligator or the bear, but the others.) It is in those glimpses that we are reminded that the leader of the free world has a heart and that the decisions he makes have been guided, in at least some small measure, by the tenderness and grace of dogs. Also raccoons.

Much has been written about what might be generously described as Donald Trump’s lack of interest in dogs, and as the election of 2020 slowly draws near, it’s a subject worth considering again. (For the record, I should note that former Vice President Joe Biden is the owner of a rescue dog named Major, a German shepherd who has been described as looking a lot “like the dog version of himself.”)

My colleague Frank Bruni has written, “For Trump, all relationships are transactional and God’s creatures possess value only in accordance with their ability to elevate and enrich him.” Indeed, our current president’s only apparent interest in dogs so far has been to use them as way to insult people he does not like. Donald Trump is, in fact, the first president since William McKinley not to have a dog.

What’s telling is not Mr. Trump’s disdain for dogs, specifically — after all, plenty of people don’t like dogs, or for that matter, cats or pygmy hippos. It’s the reasons he gives for this contempt that are so depressing. “How would I look, walking a dog on the White House lawn?” he said at a rally in El Paso last year. “I don’t know, I don’t feel good. It feels a little phony to me.”

I wonder what he means by “phony.” It is that he believes the only reason a person would ever own a dog is for P.R. reasons?

It’s true many presidential dogs have been used to help shape a politician’s image — cue Richard Nixon and his Checkers speech, or Herbert Hoover’s campaign photo of himself posing with his shepherd, King Tut. But surely the presence of an FDOTUS has other, less cynical effects. Is it so wrong to think that Donald Trump’s character might have been changed — just the smallest bit — if there were a dog beneath his roof?

It almost happened. On Thanksgiving in 2016, Mr. Trump’s friend Lois Pope told the president she wanted to give him a goldendoodle named Patton (after the general). Ms. Pope thought it might be sweet for Barron Trump, the president’s son, to have a dog in the White House. She showed the boy a photo of Patton, and she said later, “This big smile came over his face, and it just brought tears to his eyes.”