NYT’s Goldberg Compares Trump’s Method of Authoritarianism to Domestic Abuse: ‘It’s DARVO’

EXCERPT:

GOLDBERG: "Well, I think, you know, if you go back and read kind of any of the great theorists on fascism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, what they’ll say is that the authoritarian leader isn’t so much concerned with creating an alternate set of facts as he is with obliterating the sense that reality can be grasped at all. And so, in this atmosphere of intense cynicism and derangement and confusion, it’s possible for them to then try to create their own reality and people feel sort of — they feel sort of off balance in trying to reassert what they know to be true. And I think that Donald Trump is really a master of that. I mean, there’s a phrase that people in the domestic violence world use when they’re — and I think that there’s a lot of ways in which understanding how domestic abusers operate gives you some insight into how Donald Trump operates. They say it’s DARVO: deflect, attack, reverse victim and offender. So, you know, whenever, kind of, this administration accuses someone of something, in a sense, it’s always a confession. Their modus operandi is, if they commit a crime and are held accountable for it, that then shows that they have the right to prosecute someone for the identical crime."