Authoritarianism Expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat Unmasks Donald Trump's 'Diabolical' Move That Broke Republicans

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1. Not sure I'd call that "genius" even in the evil sense. It's standard crime boss technique

Gotta make sure every one one your side is scared to death to cross you.

What Donnie did that was novel, or at least modern, was to recognize that he didn't need a large army of violent people to back him. He only needed to occasional target a few key people at a time, and these days anyone can make pretty scary death threats from anywhere because so much personal information is readily available online.

So they can likely figure out where the spouse works and where the kids go to school, then make an eerily personalized death threats. In most cases even a single person could gather the information and make a number of seemingly unrelated threats from multiple accounts.

Bottom line though, for all their talk of leadership, there's not a single leader among them aside from Donnie himself, and even he is only a leader about things Putin doesn't care about because he himself is clearly scared to death to cross Putin.

The entire party has been thoroughly corrupted.