Let me tell you what I think is going on...

[Mc Mike]

24. Don't know if you saw this Nation article by Ann Jones, with the same analysis:

https://www.thenation.com/article/donald-trump-is-a-textbook-abuser-and-women-everywhere-know-it/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=daily

What struck me especially was the pattern of his tactics being like both an abusive spouse and a government brainwashing program.

"...Every woman who has ever had to deal with a Trump-style tyrant in her own home or at her job already has Trump’s number. We recognize him as a bloated specimen of the common garden variety Controlling Man, a familiar type of Household Hitler.

In fact, Donald J. Trump perfectly fits the profile of an ordinary wife abuser—with one additional twist. Expansive fellow that he is, Trump has not confined his controlling tactics to his own home(s). For seven years, he practiced them openly for all the world to see on The Apprentice, his very own reality-TV show, and now applies them on a national stage, commanding constant attention while alternately insulting, cajoling, demeaning, embracing, patronizing, and verbally beating up anyone (including a “Mexican” judge) who stands in the way of his coronation. ...
...
The tactics of such controlling men, used not on women but on other men, were first studied intensively decades ago. In the wake of the Korean War, sociologist Albert Biderman, working for the US Air Force, explored the practices used by Chinese communist thought-reformers to try to break (“brainwash”) American prisoners of war. (Think The Manchurian Candidate.) He reported his findings in “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War,” a 1957 article that caused the Air Force to change its training tactics. Following Biderman’s report, that service chose to give its high-risk personnel a taste of those tactics and thereby steel them against the pressure, if captured, of “confessing” to whatever their interrogators wanted. The Air Force program, known as SERE (for survival, evasion, resistance, escape), was extended during the war in Vietnam to special forces in the other US military services.

In 1973, Amnesty International used Biderman’s article, augmented by strikingly similar accounts from political prisoners, hostages, and concentration camp survivors, to codify a “chart of coercion.” Organizers in the battered women’s movement immediately recognized the tactics described and applied them to their work with women effectively held hostage in their own homes by abusive husbands or boyfriends. They handed that chart out in support groups at women’s shelters, and battered women soon came up with countless homespun examples of those same methods of coercion in use behind closed doors right here in the USA.

The great feminist organizer Ellen Pence and the staff of the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP) in Duluth, Minnesota, worked with battered women to refine and summarize those coercive tactics on a handy circular chart they named the Power and Control Wheel. Since its creation in 1984, that chart has been translated into at least 40 languages, and DAIP has become the international model for community-based work against domestic violence. ..."

(excerpt end)

The whole article is worth reading. It's important because it not only shows exactly where dRumpf is coming from, he's both a violent abusive self styled 'alpha male' spouse / womanizer, and he's also using tools that are actual totalitarian government brainwashing psychological tools, he's aping those tools exactly. This doesn't explicitly say that swinish l'il donnie studied totalitarian gov brainwashing techniques (but keep in mind that there's no doubt that he did study hitler's speeches in depth, that's documented.) though, as a 'successful' businessman, there's no reason to believe he DIDN'T study those techniques to give him a leg up on the competition, a blueprint on "how to dominate opponents and underlings". It's a moot point, because he's using those techniques, even if he's just a sleazy unintelligent evil person who stumbled across them through low animal cunning.

What's in dRumpf's toolbox are threats, trivial demands, a flash of charm, occasional indulgences, violence, overt lies, explosive blowing their stack anger, followed by a fear the victim feels of doing anything that might 'set them off' again. It leaves you bewildered, confused, not knowing that it wasn't you that triggered them, and not understanding you'll never figure out how to placate them to keep them from going off again. They go off when they want to, when it serves their purposes.