Thread by @ellle_em, I'm going to tell you a story about my experience with a [...]

I'm going to tell you a story about my experience with a former landlord but it's also a story about Donald Trump which sounds like it doesn't make sense but stay with me, it actually does

When my husband wanted to move out of the house we'd been renting we started looking at other places and my husband fell in love with one of them because it had a big basement and a covered garage. It belonged to a dude who'd been living in it for a while but apparently

wanted to downsize.

So we toured the house the the landlord...you know what I'll call him Dennis because I don't know anyone named Dennis and it's less annoying than typing out "the landlord" every five seconds.

Anyway, Dennis showed us the house and talked it up like, A LOT

It had THE BEST CONSTRUCTION. It had THE COOLEST WATER FILTER SYSTEM. It was HIGH QUALITY EVERYTHING.

Dennis ALSO tried to be like our BFF. Told us how he knew EVERYONE in town, how he was CONNECTED, how he owned a business, blah blah

All this made me instantly distrust him because dude was overselling but my husband told me I was being too hard on him, the house was nice, we should definitely get it.

I didn't want to but I went along with it.

Once we moved in things changed very quickly.

The first problem we had was with the oven. Whenever we'd turn the oven on, it'd overload the circuit breaker and we'd lose power in half the house.

We were like...ummm this is a problem!!! So we called Dennis to explain it

Dennis said we should probably cook our food at lower temperatures.

He was like "well I never had a problem with it!! I just turned the power back on!! It's a HIGH QUALITY OVEN come on!!"

I was like "......no"

Finally Dennis replaced the oven after stalling for a while and we were like fine ok.

Then it started raining more often and we realized the QUALITY CONSTRUCTION was actually leaky as shit, and made the back room of the house almost unusable.

Things started breaking down and Dennis would drag his feet every time. When one air conditioner broke he demanded we wait for him to find a part to make it work again because the unit was like 20 years old and he didn't want to pay to buy a new one. It took like three months

But still it was THE BEST AIR CONDITIONING, it was HIGH QUALITY it was SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE NEW CRAP

and two more units broke and we demanded them replaced because it was the middle of summer

Dennis totally lost it.

First he said he didn't have the money to fix it
Then he said he wouldn't fix it because we'd broken it
Then he said it wasn't his responsibility to fix it and that we were ungrateful because he'd let us live in his HIGH QUALITY HOUSE and all we'd done

was COST HIM MONEY with our unreasonable demands to have like, air conditioning and an oven. He was ENRAGED, he screamed and shouted and threatened and we were like ok time to leave this is getting scary and weird

So we terminated the contract

Now Dennis was up against a wall. He tried to explain that OF COURSE he had money to fix stuff, NO ONE had more money than him. And of course he'd fix things IMMEDIATELY, he was the fastest at fixing things and we were unreasonable and it was all our fault

Because my husband was in the military we had the base housing office as a mediator with Dennis. Dennis instantly began trying to make us look bad, combing through our social media and emailing screenshots of stuff to the housing office, claiming all sorts of criminal activity

He told lies that were so easily contradicted and all it did was make him look bad and unhinged but he kept doing it because for people like him, being loud is unfortunately enough a successful tactic. He shrieked and screamed and smeared and threatened

During the final inspection, a representative from the housing office was present, as well as a navy officer. When the observers told Dennis the house was absolutely fine and clean (he was trying to convince them it was a vermin-ridden heap), Dennis began screaming at them

Dennis got in the face of the navy officer and literally screamed about how the inspection was a disgrace and we were horrid monsters.

Despite the fact that it was so obvious none of what he claimed was true. It didn't matter.

He ended up presenting a bunch of unreasonable demands (350euro to replace two sets of sheer curtains from IKEA) and we ended up getting back much less than we should have of our security deposit because no one wanted to fight this guy anymore. No one wanted to listen to him

scream and lie and carry on so we gave him what he wanted just to get the hell away from him.

Now what does this have to do with Donald Trump?

Well, everything

Because Dennis and Trump are very much alike in a lot of ways:

obvious lying
loud & frantic accusations
has to be THE BEST at everything
if ppl are unhappy it's THEIR fault
winning is all that matters
burying ppl in paperwork to avoid responsibility

The more desperate Dennis got the more dangerous he became. He was willing to burn everything to the ground in order to get what he felt he deserved from us. It didn't matter how obvious the lies were if he shouted them loud enough and often enough. Everything was hollow

but that didn't matter because as long as Dennis looked like he was "winning," it was fine. His entire identity was bound up in winning; life was a series of confrontations and the most important thing was winning each of them. It's about power and control but it's also

about fear. Dennis was afraid of what losing would do to him because all he really had was the supposed respect of people who saw him as a winner. He acted in ways that were entirely illogical--yelling at the Navy officer, for example--but the only logic that mattered was winning

Trump, like Dennis, is an inherently selfish man but don't confuse that with self-preservation. Sure, Trump prizes survival above all else but to him, like Dennis, winning is part of survival.

Like Dennis, Trump will do illogical things to preserve the perception of winning

Trump can't just recover from COVID19; he has to recover THE FASTEST, he has to recover WITH NO EFFECTS AT ALL, he has to prove he's winning against the virus and to do that means risking not only his health but also the health of everyone around him.

So what I'm trying to get at here is: do not count on someone's desire for self-preservation to stop them from doing something dangerous because for people like Trump, self-preservation is about perception as much as it is about reality

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