I have never been without a dog. I love dogs. I miss the ones I have lost. I especially miss Molly, a Tibetan terrier, who was funny and lovable. She died of lymphoma. I miss Lady, a cocker spaniel, who was a rescue. She always curled herself around my feet and slept on the floor next to my bed. Now we have Mitzi, a 92-pound sweetheart, 57 varieties of dog, all wonderful.

Who doesn’t love dogs? Donald Trump.

Molly Roberts wrote in the Washington Post:

 

“How would I look walking a dog on the White House lawn?” President Trump asked during his rally in El Paso on Monday night.

The question was rhetorical — part of a meandering monologue that started with a shout-out to German shepherds for their bomb-sniffing skills and ended with an explanation of the president’s petlessness. But there’s an answer, and it offers another window into the Trumpian worldview.

The last time the White House lawn didn’t have a president walking a dog on it was in 1901. That’s nearly 120 years of canine constancy before Trump came along and decided to pass. Maybe these men just liked dogs, or maybe they knew that liking dogs meant their constituents liking them.

Warren G. Harding’s Laddie Boy is widely hailed as the first celebrity presidential dog. The Airedale terrier, an historian told The Post’s Caitlin Gibson, was meant to convey “warmth and approachability” after Woodrow Wilson’s comparative stiffness during his tenure. Richard Nixon, accused of corruption during his campaign for the vice presidency in 1952, famously resurrected Republican support in a speech declaring that one gift he would never return was a black-and-white dog named Checkers.

Other dogs, from Lyndon B. Johnson’s beagles to Bo Obama, have inspired public obsessions and even children’s books. George H.W. Bush’s dog, Millie, even “wrote” her own. There’s a reason Mitt Romney caught so much criticism for strapping his own family pooch to the roof of a car: Americans see a fondness for hounds as a sign of humanity. Our attraction to these loyal and innocent creatures is supposed to be instinctual and almost universal; man loving dogs is part of what makes man man, and if we are alike in nothing else at least we are alike in this.

Trump isn’t interested. He said so himself Monday: Feigning a desire for an animal he doesn’t “have any time” for would feel “phony,” and “that’s not the relationship I have with my people.”

Maybe there’s something admirable in this dedication to genuineness. So what if Trump’s contempt for the four-legged proves that he lacks a heart, soul or any other human-making attribute? But look at Trump’s history of hound-related remarks, and his scorn is more telling than just that.

Trump has talked about dogs before. A lot, in bizarre fashion.

“Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!” he remarked of former adviser Stephen K. Bannon.

“Union Leader” — a newspaper — “refuses to comment as to why they were kicked out of the ABC News debate like a dog,” he barked.

“Good work by General [John F.] Kelly for quickly firing that dog!” he exclaimed after Omarosa Manigault Newman’s ignominious departure from the White House.

These misbegotten similes have prompted arunning gag among commentators who wonder, only half ironically, if the president knows what a dog is. The speculation may seem glib, but it speaks to a real disconnect: Trump’s understanding of the dog as something to be fired, dumped and kicked doesn’t jibe with the general view of the meaningful relationship between people and dogs — the same relationship that has led past presidents, and the public, to view dog ownership as so humanizing. To Trump, dogs serve an opposing purpose. He uses them to dehumanize instead.

By comparing people to canines to portray both as pathetic, Trump establishes distance between some men and women and other men and women, instead of commonality. It’s a favorite trick of his. Undocumented immigrants, the president has said, will “infest” the country. They are “animals.” And indeed, Trump’s highest praise for dogs so far seems to have come during this week’s rally with his ode to the German shepherd delivered as part of his case for a wall to keep Mexicans out of the country.

None of this is surprising, but it is clarifying. Trump is right, after all: Appeals to humanity are not the relationship he has with his people. He doesn’t win his supporters, or keep them around, with paeans to what brings us together. On the contrary, the allure of his campaign to white Americans worried about displacement in a browning America was how it defined itself in opposition to the other. There’s no room for softness there. Walking on the White House lawn with a dog would ruin the image. It would look nice, and it would look human, and because of those things it would also look weak.

A fake quotation made the rounds on social media this fall, spreading far enough that fact-checkers had to debunk it: “I never understood why people like dogs. Dogs are disgusting,” it read, with the president’s name falsely appended. “As if we needed another reason . . .” mused the accompanying meme. Trump never said those words, and we don’t need another reason for condemning his agenda. But the words he has said, from firing to dumping to kicking to lawn-walking, remind us of the reasons we already have.