General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsLet me tell you what I think is going on...
The China tweet, the nuclear tweet, the King/Jesus tweet...this is how an abuser behaves. Keep the victim ( the whole country) stressed and off balance. My ex used to say shit like this. "You know, I could take the kids and disappear". It is the tactic of an abuser. Trump and the RNC are abusing us FULL STOP. Don't you get it? We will be thrilled when all they do is restructure Social Security or replace Medicare with vouchers. We are being PLAYED.
cilla4progress
(24,760 posts)I believe you are correct!!!
Season's greetings!
John_Doe80004
(156 posts)that the,,
SPLC
ACLU
AARP
Social Security Works
fight like hell using the media and the courts to try and stop them!!!
it would be a fiscal and social disaster!!!
i can't stress this enough, those programs are the only thing right now between the country and great depression era unemployment, homelessness, and skyrocketing quality of life crime rates!!!
if it was not for entitlements and bailouts in 08 we would be living in a 2nd great depression right now.
and i sincerely think this is what they are trying to do so they can declare martial law, suspend the constitution and start locking up those not like us (meaning rich, white, and male) in work camps.
the absolute best way to fix these programs is to bring back good paying, full time jobs offering benefits.
getting a good tax base back and scrapping the cap on SS will fix almost all of the problems with these programs
First Speaker
(4,858 posts)...and too many liberals fall for it. As you say--they think we'll be satisfied with whatever crumbs of decency they might deign to give us. Well, I for one have no intention of being "satisfied", nor will I sit back and tolerate abuse--from anyone...
murielm99
(30,755 posts)My mother behaves this way. It is to keep everyone off balance. I stopped paying attention to her years ago.
We need to ignore trump and make it known that we are turning off news coverage of him and ignoring his tweets. Let him know that we are monumentally bored with his daily antics.
ProudProgressiveNow
(6,129 posts)UTUSN
(70,725 posts)JudyM
(29,265 posts)And one of our autocrat's hallmarks is his tweeting.
NightWatcher
(39,343 posts)Something tells me trump will be tossed as soon as the repukes are tired of him, the impeachment will be swift.
mexit
(47 posts)the world has turned upside down
mchill
(1,018 posts)The Madman Theory:
The madman theory was a feature of Richard Nixon's foreign policy. He and his administration tried to make the leaders of hostile Communist Bloc nations think Nixon was irrational and volatile. According to the theory, those leaders would then avoid provoking the United States, fearing an unpredictable American response.
The problem is, Donald Trump is a madman, he is not just playing the part.
grantcart
(53,061 posts)In 1517, Machiavelli had argued that sometimes it is "a very wise thing to simulate madness" (Discourses on Livy, book 3, chapter 2). In Nixon's Vietnam War, Kimball argues that Nixon arrived at the strategy independently, as a result of practical experience and observation of Dwight D. Eisenhower's handling of the Korean War.[5]
The Madman strategy was also used by Vladimir Putin [6]
grantcart
(53,061 posts)By offering totally nutty alternatives he positions himself with an outlandish bargaining position so that when he comes in with a really bad alternative he will appear reasonable.
Example:
Trump proposes a series of anti-Muslim measures including mandatory registration.
Outrage follows.
Trump counters with a proposal to make federal education dollars tied to public education adding a mandatory Western Civilization Course that will include a heavy dose of 'the benefits of Christianity'. Pundits and allies will state that Trump is being 'flexible', 'reasonable' and 'moderate'. They will then pin the Democrats into a position of seemingly appear to 'attack' Christianity.
I do agree that we are being played.
MrScorpio
(73,631 posts)This is how wars start
bucolic_frolic
(43,257 posts)Abuse. Unpredictability.
btw, they will steal all federal assets. There's money there.
I doubt FDIC will be safe.
CousinIT
(9,255 posts)smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)Bernardo de La Paz
(49,032 posts)Then he does whatever he wants. At one time or another he has taken and spoken/tweet both sides of an issue, so he will say "I'm only doing what I said I'd do".
Of course, being the overly-self-esteeming narcissist that he is, he forgets what he has said in the past if it doesn't match what he is trying to say at the moment.
KittyWampus
(55,894 posts)with vouchers."
TBA
(825 posts)Should have made that clearer.
sellitman
(11,607 posts)That isn't to say Ryan and the rest of the turds won't take advantage of their good fortune and screwed the rest of us.
Ford_Prefect
(7,917 posts)The media needs to call it what it is.
Mc Mike
(9,115 posts)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 Trumps 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 abuserwith 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 Bidermans 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 Bidermans article, augmented by strikingly similar accounts from political prisoners, hostages, and concentration camp survivors, to codify a chart of coercion. Organizers in the battered womens 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 womens 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.
Hekate
(90,773 posts)All along this past year I've wondered about Melania. I'm not the only one who has speculated that she'd leave him once he lost this election. Well, now he's "won" and she is further trapped. I think she's emotionally battered, probably physically as well.
That bit about how he displayed all this behavior to the nation in The Apprentice to great approval is just chilling.
Mc Mike
(9,115 posts)big brother, survivor, apprentice, etc., have always struck me as fascist propaganda. People sticking it to each other, doing each other down, there can only be one winner, everyone else has to be defeated, beaten. People tune in to hope someone they don't like, who they're rooting against, will be eliminated. Players making alliances that both sides know will end in betrayal. Horrible crappy nazi b.s., horrible Un American sentiments. But the big corporate tv networks think they're fantastic, wonderful, entertaining.
The violent attack and rape dRumpf committed on Ivana and the non-retraction retraction by her definitely said so much about that nazi pig.
He couldn't take the idea that he was going bald. He's so superficial, so immature, so vain. So she recommended a plastic surgeon. He was very dissatisfied and unhappy with the surgery's results, and he was in pain from the surgery. He blamed her, like somehow she did this to him, with malice. Or he was just in pain, and couldn't deal with feeling pain. So he lashed out like an unthinking lesser evolved life form on autopilot, purely on instinct, a person who is used to denying themselves absolutely nothing, a person who always acts on whatever whim or fleeting impulse they have. Whatever he feels like doing, he does, every time, everywhere. He attacked her, tore out chunks of her hair, and raped her. He can feel better if he can spread his misery and pain to others. It didn't make his pain decrease physically one iota, but in his diseased mind, as long as she was in terrible pain and humiliated, he could be happier.
(Of course, that fake alpha male animal self-conception he holds is one that he's shown himself capable of conveniently shelving when it comes to him ever putting himself in any situation that presents even the tiniest bit of danger or pain to his precious self. Like any other average run of the mill little bully. Alpha male drumpfenfuhrer run away from the draft during wartime, but he's so hawkish and warlike now. And David Cay Johnston reported that whenever dRumpf had to do business with the extremely dangerous and violent Scarfo family, he never went himself to negotiate. He always sent subordinates. He never took even the smallest chance that there would be risk of harm to himself. But he struts around talking like he's a made man, all the time, now.)
Ivana's retraction was such that she didn't retract a word of her report of the incident, she just said she did not mean to imply he raped her in the criminal sense of the word, she didn't want to press any actual criminal charge of rape against him.
I don't think I'm telling you any particular specific info, here, Hek. Just typing it out to make sense of it myself.
Hekate
(90,773 posts)MFM008
(19,818 posts)!!!
lunatica
(53,410 posts)in spades. He's the walking, talking epitome of an abusive person. Anyone who doesn't see at least one of these characteristics is a total idiot. His base see all of these quite clearly, but the difference is that they like these attributes in their leaders. They truly believe that punishing sadism is the only hallmark of real leadership. It's their definition of a "strong leader".
It's what they dream of him doing to everyone they don't like.
lastlib
(23,271 posts)they're DOING the less-terrible things.............they're opening the battles on so many fronts, we exhaust ourselves trying to fight them all. We need a better strategy to allocate our resources and fight more strategically. (I say that knowing that I have no clue how to do it...... . )
zentrum
(9,865 posts)Initech
(100,099 posts)The Republicans have gerrymandered us and abused us for so long that we have no choice but to fall for our captors. Believe me I've done a lot of research into abusive relationships and I too feel like the US is in an abusive relationship with the GOP. I fear things are going to get worse before they get better.
Cosmocat
(14,568 posts)Of us get it and want no part of it.
1/3 of the country are asshat Republicans who get off on it.
1/3 of the country are apolitical or "independents" who are beaten down by it.
This isn't new, it is what Rs have been doing for a quarter century in an ever increasing manner. It just is the next, hyper evolution of it.
And we are pretty much helpless because even though we see it, 2/3 of the rest of the country doesnt.
pangaia
(24,324 posts)WHY THE FUCK don't our DEMOCRATIC "REPRESENTATIVES" Get it and shout it from the roof tops?? With very few exceptions they are NOWHERE TO BE SEEN OR HEARD !!!
BlancheSplanchnik
(20,219 posts)SleeplessinSoCal
(9,135 posts)And parts of my family opt to practice this.
Marthe48
(17,011 posts)I want to report my personal experience without bragging or encouraging someone to get into danger. In my life, I've stopped 3 physically abusive incidents, by telling the abuser to stop. I was young and there weren't guns in every pocket. I didn't want to see someone getting beaten up, so I stopped it. I didn't think of the men being dangerous to me. I forgot that I was involved in those incidents, 30-40 years ago, until some reminiscing brought them to mind just last night. The important thing about the incidents is that the men backed down. I know one man was motivated to change himself and how he treated his family. I hope that by interfering, I changed the other men as well. I'm 64 now and resolved that I won't be bullied or abused, and if I have to be tough for someone else, I'll speak up. As individuals, we can continue to live our lives and trying to make a difference. Use solar power, drive less, don't litter, pick up litter, buy as little new as possible, protect the environment, donate to PP, ACLU, any group that supports good will or good work. No one can stop me trying. But our elected officials, our military, our police and all of the elected, employed, appointed protectors have to do their part as well. If d.ump and his bedmates are trying to sell us down the river, or tries to hand our country over to Russia, we as individuals and those who are sworn to serve and protect, have to say no, however it needs to be said. Happy freakin' new year...
Kablooie
(18,638 posts)Every article about Trump has to be prefaced with "If" because no one has any idea what he will really do in office.
Sure we have some of his cabinet choices that are disturbing but that still doesn't say anything about what he will really do once he's in office. He may go in a totally opposite direction from his tweets. He has demonstrated that he doesn't often follow through with his claims.
He may be more responsible that we expect or he may be more erratic and dangerous than we expect. ( Hard to imagine, but I don't put anything beyond him.)
Right now all he can do is lob dummy molotov cocktails around to get attention.
Once he has the arsenal of real, explosive molotov cocktails under his control it is unknown what he will do.
Just hope he realizes that playing a loaded gun is different from playing with a toy one.