People who have experience with domestic violence know something very important.

The most extreme danger comes when you try to break up or leave the abuser. Your life, those you care about, and your profession and possessions are most in danger at the point you decide you’re done. Abusers will burn your life down when/as you walk away. Those that placated them believe they will be spared but they won’t. Abusers will burn it all – friends, work, children. And they enlist others to help either by threat or promise of reward. When others refuse they turn the fire on them as well.

Abusers don’t stop until they run out of resources, get locked up or die. It’s all they know how to do. They are the feral hogs of the human species. They want to feed indiscriminately and will charge anyone who tries to stop them.

Every person who has ever dealt with an abuser knows about this critical danger point.

True at the micro level. True at the macro level. True in the home and true in the White House.