He lies. He bullies. He threatens. He calls women names.
Also? Trump’s persona, his demeanor, his shtick dovetails alarmingly neatly with that of the domestic abuser. I don’t think I’d thought of it exactly that way before, but reading it caused zero surprise. Of course it does.
Or, another way of putting that is simply what I and many others have said often, which is just that he’s a bully. His bully characteristics are blindingly obvious. Naturally a bully and a domestic abuser are going to overlap neatly.
He lies. He bullies. He threatens. He calls women names. And he’s the Republican nominee for president.
…
Donald Trump and his bombastic, truth-free persona is still baffling to many. But for one select group of people ― survivors of domestic violence ― Trump is immediately and intimately recognizable.
He reminds them of the men who ruined their lives.
“Trump is triggering so many abuse and rape victims including me,” Angel Marie Russell wrote on Facebook after the first presidential debate. “His behavior is almost exact to my abusive exes. It’s terrifying. I can’t even watch him.”
While domestic abuse is often characterized as acts of physical violence, it’s more accurate to understand it as a cluster of specific behavioral tactics that abusers employ to control, intimidate and coerce victims.
Many of the behaviors that Trump exhibited at the first presidential debate were strikingly similar to those used by abusers, said Rus Ervin Funk, a consultant for several domestic violence non-profits who has worked closely with men who batter.
“His efforts to control Ms. Clinton and the dynamics of the debate (through his interrupting, his talking over and more loudly than Ms. Clinton) coupled with his very well-developed ability to evade accountability of any kind certainly reminded me of how men who batter operate,” he said.
And then there’s the gaslighting.
On multiple occasions during the debate, Trump denied saying things that he had said before, such as when he claimed he never supported the Iraq war or said climate change is a hoax, despite clear evidence to the contrary.
This willingness to aggressively deny objective truths is a form of emotional abuse, called “gas-lighting.” Gas-lighting can cause victims to doubt their own memories and perceptions, and make it hard to distinguish fact from fiction.
And this man is wildly popular. That tells us something.
This. So much this. I grew up with this. My brother has used these same tactics his whole life. I lived with this level of ugly abuse for my entire childhood, and because I was young and impressionable, I internalized it. Because so many people (including my parents) regarded my brother as a brilliant and amazing person, I must, by definition, be the opposite.
And this has stretched further than I realized. Last year I was having dinner with a female cousin I hadn’t seen in a number of years. She is a beautiful, brilliant, accomplished woman who is incredibly respected in her field. She has done amazing things. At one point, the conversation turned to my brother, who is similar in age to my cousin (a few years older than me, but not much). She talked about when they used to argue about things when they were in high school. She got this look on her face, and sighed “(X) is so smart”. I recognized that look. I had felt it on my own face often enough when I was feeling inferior to some male who had crapped on me. My brother has accomplished nothing, has spent most of his life living off women (his wives worked more hours, harder jobs than he did – he has been almost chronically unemployed). He views other people as “losers”. He feels he is smarter than others. He cannot take direction from others, particularly women or people of color, because he knows he is smarter than they are (this is, by the way, rarely true).
I also am an educated woman with a set of accomplishments. I still come up wanting when compared to my brother, because penis-no penis. And when I watch Trump, I shake with the terrors of a childhood spent living with a bully who got pleasure from beating down other people, especially women and people of color.
Ugh, god. That’s so sad and horrifying.
Sorry for being so personal. Sometimes you just have to tell someone and the anonymity of the Internet can be a great release.
Don’t be sorry. It’s highly relevant, and very well said.
iknklast, I value your sharing.