The dominant chimp is a pretty good way to think about how Trump rules, one of the better ways, I’d say. Here’s an excerpt from a very well-written article on Trump, written by Dan P McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University:
“Our expectation that social status can be seized through physical power and threat – that the strongest, biggest and boldest may indeed lord it over the rest of us – is very old, awesomely intuitive, and deeply ingrained. Social psychologists today distinguish between the social dominance form of human leadership, on the one hand, and leadership through prestige on the other. Both are grounded in human evolution, but the prestige form is younger, tracing back a mere million years or so to the time when our hominid ancestors began to form culture…”
