DONALD TRUMP HELD court in the Oval Office last week with exactly the kind of crowd he loves—the world’s richest man at his side, a gaggle of journalists at his foot. Teeing up a speech from Elon Musk, the president promised to share some shocking discoveries. “Billions and billions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse,” Trump marveled. “I think it’s very important. And that’s one of the reasons I got elected. I said we were going to do that. Nobody had any idea it was that bad, that sick and that corrupt.”

In fact, inspectors general, independent watchdogs throughout the government, have been working for years with the explicit mission of rooting out “waste, fraud and abuse.” Trump fired a group of them en masse on the evening of Jan. 24, kicking off his first weekend back in power with a purge. The fallout from those dismissals became apparent in the Oval Office last week—their jobs are now Musk’s job.

Members of Washington’s oversight community, the people who fret about how the government does its business, have been in a state of bewilderment ever since Trump returned to the White House. The president storms ahead, appointing loyalists, wiping out regulations and unilaterally pausing the enforcement of certain laws, such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans Americans from paying bribes overseas. Trump seems unconcerned that Musk wields enormous power with limited visibility into potential conflicts of interest, something the Office of Government Ethics generally ensures. The president fired its director, too. “Sort of in-your-face ‘F you’ to ethics,” scoffs Richard Painter, who served as George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer.

But nothing about the way Trump has barged back into the White House surprises those who have known him for decades. “I mean, I was talking to an old colleague the other day, I was saying, ‘Hey, this is exactly what I thought it was going to be,” laughs Andrew Weiss, who worked inside the Trump Organization from 1981 to 2017. “It’s like, well hang onto your britches because it ain’t going to be smooth riding. You know, that’s the way he is.”

Trump has long been a man of contradictions, making it difficult to pinpoint exactly what makes him tick. He is both charming and abrasive, fast to forge connections and quick to cut them, certain to hold grudges and willing to forgive. Amid the contradictions, however, lie consistencies, including his process for exerting control over those around him. Understand Trump’s moves, and so much else starts to make sense—the relationship with Musk, war on the bureaucracy, churn inside his administration, even the polarization of the country. The future becomes clearer, too, because Trump’s seemingly unpredictable behavior has followed the same formula for a half century.

“WATCH DONALD WHEN he starts a relationship,” says Alan Marcus, who entered Trump’s orbit about 30 years ago. “Donald is the greatest at putting on charm. He’s an impresario. He should have been the head waiter at the Copacabana, you know—and he makes you feel good.”

And special, even though he uses the same moves on everyone. The first time one former casino analyst met Trump, the real estate mogul sent a car to pick him up in style. “He told me, ‘You can look for it—a big stretch limo, license plate ‘DJT,’” the analyst recalls. Others received rides on Trump’s yacht and plane. Shortly after being named chief of staff to New Jersey’s incoming governor in 1989, Steven Perskie got a dinner invitation for him and his wife, who feared Trump would spend the night yakking about business. “He was personable, he included her in the conversation,” Perskie recalls. “It was a pleasant evening, to our amazement.”

Boxing events often served as a lure. “We flew down there on his helicopter to do the underwriting,” recalls Mike Offit, who worked for Deutsche Bank. “When I got there, you know, he said, ‘We’ll have dinner,’” Offit recalls. “He goes, ‘Oh, do you want to have dinner with Evander Holyfield?’ ‘I said ‘Yeah. Yes, I want to have dinner with Evander Holyfield.’” At the restaurant, Trump started recounting highlights with the heavyweight champ in vivid detail, prompting Offit to ask whether Trump had done some homework ahead of time. “He goes, ‘No, I love boxing. I remember everything,’” Offit recalls. “‘Clearly you do because I saw those fights and don’t remember any of that.’ It was fascinating.”

This stage of Trump’s relationship building has been on full display over the last few months, as the president-elect hosted politicians, business tycoons and foreign leaders to his private club in Palm Beach—while naming the lineup of people joining him in Washington, pouring out praise with the announcements. Perhaps no one has received quite as much adulation—or access—as “super genius” Elon Musk. “He loves associating with rich guys,” says Marcus, who handled communications for Trump. It’s surely fun for Musk, too. “People like to be with Donald in that phase of the relationship,” Marcus adds. “Everybody wants to be with him. It’s easy to want to be with him. Hey, I’m sure I felt that way, certainly at the outset.”

Over time, however, the displays of affection can morph into displays of power. Some of this has played out in public, like when Trump shakes hands. Shortly after clasping palms, he often yanks his counterparty, simultaneously setting them off balance while bringing them closer. He sometimes smiles throughout this routine, leaving the other person feeling embraced, if a bit small.

Marcus remembers one time when Trump got wind that his daughter and three of her sorority sisters wanted to spend New Years’ Eve in Atlantic City. “It’s taken care of,” Trump told him over the phone. “She’s staying at the Taj Mahal.” When Marcus called to thank Trump afterward, the mogul surprised him. “He says, ‘By the way, your daughter is very attractive.’ I said, ‘Excuse me?’ He says, ‘Well yeah, I had security following her, and I had a video.’”

Why would Trump say such a thing? “I think it was him telling me, ‘I am all powerful.’”

TRUMP SOMETIMES CONVEYS that message more bluntly. “He did sue everyone,” says Barbara Res, a former Trump Organization executive, who specifically remembers a dispute with one contractor. In the middle of a discussion, Trump reached into his desk. “He had, in his drawer, a picture of Roy Cohn”—Trump’s famously combative lawyer—“and it was grainy, black and white,” Res says. “The man looked like the devil. And he’d pull it out, and he’d hold it, and he’d say, ‘This is my lawyer.’ He’d say that. ‘You want to go against him? Because I am ready.’”

Trump especially likes to apply pressure to people who won’t cave to his charm. Critics often mistake the president as someone who disdains expertise—in fact, he latches onto expertise when it is ultimately subservient to him. He has hired sharp, qualified people to work for him throughout his life, including in the White House. What he doesn’t like are people who are confident enough in their carefully formed views that they’re unwilling to bow to his sometimes-uninformed impulses. In the old days, Trump had to take time to feel out whether someone would be loyal to him or their conscience. Now, he often knows at the outset, especially when people like inspectors general or judges wear their independence as a badge. “Maybe we have to look at the judges,” Trump mused alongside Musk in the Oval Office last week.

Marvin Roffman, a casino analyst with Janney Montgomery Scott, came to understand this side of Trump 35 years ago. Despite receiving a full charm offensive—complete with yacht rides and boxing matches—Roffman remained, at his core, a numbers guy, who couldn’t make sense of Trump’s soon-to-be-opened casino, the Trump Taj Mahal. “Every time I did an exercise on my computer, I always came up with the same [thing]—it was impossible for this thing to make money,” Roffman says now.

Roffman shared his analysis at the time with a reporter from the Wall Street Journal, who published a story in the spring of 1990, on the very same day that Trump had invited Roffman to an advance tour of the Taj. When Roffman arrived, Donald’s brother Robert was waiting. “All I heard out of him were four-letter words,” says Roffman. “They actually escorted me off the property.” Roffman found a pay phone to call his office, only to hear that Trump had gotten in touch first, and Roffman needed to return to the office promptly.

When he arrived, Roffman’s boss said they were going to call Trump. The real estate mogul demanded a public apology, threatened to sue Roffman’s firm, told the analyst to claim he was misquoted and asked for a written prediction saying the Taj would be a massive success. When the call ended, Roffman’s boss told him to write the letter. “I said, ‘I can’t. This thing is going to go bankrupt,’” says Roffman. “So you know what they did? They wrote the letter for me. And he brings the letter in for me to sign. And really what he was saying is, ‘If you’re not a team player, you’re not going to be working here.’ So I signed the letter, and I went home.”

Roffman couldn’t sleep that night. He returned to the office the next morning and told his boss to take back the letter. Then Trump called, saying he wanted the letter to paint an even rosier picture. “So I wrote a letter, and I faxed it to Trump,” Roffman recalls, “and I said, ‘Everything in that letter was not written by me. … And I hereby order you not to use this letter for any purpose whatsoever.’ And then the next thing I knew, my boss came in and says, ‘Goodbye.’ And they escorted me out of the building. I had been there 17 years.”

Trump got exactly what he wanted. “He went and got him fired, which was kind of a message to everyone else,” says another former analyst, who, 35 years after this happened, said he did not want to speak on the record for fear that Trump could target him, too. “I remember being astounded.”

The next year, the casino went bankrupt.

WHAT MAKES TRUMP’S playbook different from some bullies is that he doesn’t just act nice, then become mean forever—Trump often turns back on the charm. When a housing official in New York proved to be particularly difficult, Trump simply hired him. Trump also reconnected in the mid-2000s with a former reporter named Neil Barsky, whom the tycoon had gotten reassigned to cover other people, and reminisced about old fights with a hint of nostalgia. Even Marvin Roffman, after the firing, received a handwritten thank-you letter from Trump when the analyst later made a positive comment about the mogul’s business. “Blew my mind,” Roffman says.

The result of such whiplash: People who have experienced the various stages of a Trump relationship often remain tied to him, yet also fearful of his wrath, concluding that praising Trump—or at least staying silent about his shortcomings—is the best survival strategy. No wonder so many of Trump’s previous organizations lacked basic governance controls (and ended up in trouble because of it). His publicly traded casino company, stacked with people close to him, allowed so much self-dealing that it ultimately had to rewrite its rules. His private foundation, which had a board that did not meet for 19 years, crossed so many nonprofit boundaries that the New York attorney general shut it down. His real estate business, with finances overseen by a subservient non-CPA, committed so much deceit that the Trump Organization ended up convicted of tax crimes and its former chief financial officer went to jail—twice.

Asked about the many phases of Trump’s relationships, White House spokesperson Harrison Fields emphasized the president’s soft side. “Trump is a selfless, dedicated and resilient man, which is why he earned the trust of 77 million American voters and the admiration of numerous foreign leaders.”

The truth is, 10 years after entering politics, Trump has walk-on-a-tightrope relationships all over Washington, which explains the silence—and sometimes excitement—surrounding once-unimaginable moves, like hosting the Republican Party conference at the president’s golf resort last month. “The Republican Party, as I have always known it, stands for limited government, stands for a limited exercise of powers, stands for a respect of the separation of powers within the government structure,” says Steven Perskie, who, after serving as chief of staff to New Jersey’s governor, dealt with Trump as the chairman of New Jersey’s Casino Control Commission. “And I am stunned that more—any—Republican leadership anywhere around the country, not just in Washington, isn’t saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’”

“Donald has what he’s always wanted,” concludes Marcus, the communications consultant. “They sit there now in lockstep. Have you heard from Mitt Romney? No. Nobody. Bush? Nobody. Johnson, my gosh. I don’t know if he’s speaker of the House or the guy that they’re sending for Big Macs. It’s not only amazing the control that he has been able to assert, but it’s scary.”