I keep struggling with how to describe Donald J. Trump’s lack of empathy in time of crisis.

Two words keep tugging at me. One of them is “inability.” The other is “unwillingness.” My struggle occurs as I ponder how to define what we witness in Trump’s demeanor while he speaks publicly about any number of issues that pull and pound our hearts.

Whether it’s race relations, or natural disaster, or medical crises I find myself torn between defining Trump’s lack of empathy and compassion as his “inability” to exhibit it or his “unwillingness” to show it.

The nation has heard in recent days from one of Trump’s nieces, Mary Trump, who writes in a new tell-all about Uncle Donald that he was brought up in a sociopathic household led by a domineering father, Fred Trump Sr.

Grandpa Fred instilled in his children an ethic that required them to be always tough and to not let the world see a softer side of them. Apologizing for mistakes is a sign of weakness, Mary Trump writes.

Did this upbringing create, as Mary Trump’s book title suggests, “the most dangerous man in the world”? I am left to wonder whether Trump is who he is because he just cannot find the empathy and compassion that he lacks or is it because he is unwilling to search for it, to apply it to the job he inherited when he became president of the United States in January 2017.

I’ve known many men and women who have been brought up in trying circumstances. Yet they power through it. They become better human beings because they are able to search for — and eventually find — the trait that instills some sense of kindness in them.

Thus, I am left to rely on the belief that Trump is merely “unwilling” to show us compassion, to demonstrate a semblance of empathy toward those who are hurting. He says the words, as he did Tuesday when he spoke to us about the COVID-19 pandemic. He speaks to us as though he is reading from a statement written under duress. I hear him speak those words as if he is being punished by a schoolteacher who caught him cheating on an exam.

Could this guy ever find a way to exhibit genuine, authentic compassion or empathy? I do not believe he is willing to look deeply enough for it within himself.