Berlusconi to Trump. And it is now being used by many GOP too.

So simple a child can use it to divide a school: "Us vs. The Enemy."

Authoritarians need the elites to help them; they cannot rise alone.

In Hitler's case, some people even more powerful than him thought they could "use" him to achieve their own ends, believing he was a useful idiot (especially Kurt von Schleicher and Franz von Papen, but later Paul von Hindenburg) to form a coalition government to block the liberal parties from controlling the Reichstag. They played Russian Roulette and lost, and von Schleicher paid with his life on The Night of the Long Knives.

Doesn't that sound like the case with Trump? McConnell, Jeff Sessions, other GOP, the Mercers, Sheldon Adelson, elites in the Christian Nationalist Movement and White Supremacists like Stephen Miller thought, "We have an apolitical, amoral useful idiot here who we can pressure to giver us judges, tax cuts, draconian immigration laws, anything we ask for."