The airport in Las Vegas last Friday afternoon was what you might expect for a WrestleMania weekend. Packed terminal. Delays stacking up. Nobody going anywhere. Then we heard why.

Air Force One was on the ground. Everything stopped. No one was taking off until the president finished doing his business.

I was in no rush, but I can’t even thank him for the break. I ended up waiting 20 minutes for a bar seat at a restaurant named after a sports league, all to order a meal that ended up upsetting my stomach. It was a quintessentially American moment.

People were doing what people do. Checking their phones. Standing up like something might have changed. Sitting back down when it hadn’t.

When Air Force One finally started moving, a few people across Terminal B jumped to their feet. Plenty of us, myself included, didn’t. I sat staring the opposite way, where I could clearly read the president’s name atop his Vegas hotel.

Power moves. The rest of us wait.

I kept watching Interstellar on my phone. It’s a sin to see Christopher Nolan’s films on something so small, but I’d been going back through it to rewatch a particular scene, when one character explains something that sounds cold but rings true: human empathy has a hard limit. It rarely extends beyond what we can actually see. At the most fundamental level, we are built to care for what is proximate.

Sitting in that terminal, it didn’t feel like a theory. Trump and the movement around him understand this very human........

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