The Strategic Genius Behind Trump's Chaos - Jeffrey Sonnenfeld

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1:00Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney+. Let's go! Get ready for a new case. We're the greatest partners of all time! New friends. Gary Death Snake. And your last name? Death Snake. Dream Team. New habitats. Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record-breaking phenomenon at home. Zootopia 2, now available on Disney +, rated PG. And right now you can get Disney +, and Hulu for just$4.99 a month for three months with a special limited time offer. Ends March 24th. After three months, plan auto-renews at$12.99 a month. terms apply. What looks like chaos is actually calculated strategy in many ways.

1:35Sometimes it's just chaos for the sake of chaos to throw people off the strategy, but there is a lot of calculation

1:41Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:that goes on here. He's a master of illusion. Harry Houdini and P.T. Barnum had nothing on him in terms of knowing how to create distraction, smoke, mirrors. One of the things he uses was studying whatever worked in the 1930s in Germany. As you tell smart people both sides of the story and I plant some fatal flaws in the argument on one side. So a sophisticated audience thinks they're hearing both sides, but in fact, they're driven to one answer. An unsophisticated audience doesn't have the time or interest to get into the details. You tell them one side and both sides, you just keep hammering the same message.

2:11Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:So eventually you can get 20 % of the country to believe that the elections were rigged in 2020. He's the only person we'll ever know in history that will try to change a negative narrative on himself with even more negative news. People try to substitute it true or false with positive news. He'll actually shoot himself in one foot so he don't look at the other foot, as he did with the Obama racial caricatures. That was pure distraction. There's no reason he needed to put that out. But again, it's on a Friday night. He threw off all the Sunday news shows to talk about the racism there. And he figured he doesn't care.

2:41Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:He'll come up with something by Monday that I have people talking about something else. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is Jeffrey Sonnenfeld. He's a professor and senior associate dean for leadership studies at Yale University. and the Yale School of Management and a terrific friend. So title of the book, and it's a bestseller, is Trump's Ten Commandments, Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox. And so, Jeff, listen, we've known each other for a long time. It's great to have you on. I want to start with the mission here. What led you to write the book?

3:19And then we'll talk about the arguments that you're making in it.

3:23Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:Well, thanks a lot, Anthony. I appreciate it. Nobody on this planet could understand this book as well as you could. And thank God I wrote this one before you did because you could have knocked this right out of the park. In fact, your Jack endorsement says Sonnenfeld has captured Trump's strategic playbook as nobody has before. It's impossible to understand how Trump operates unless you read this book or talk to Anthony Scaramucci. And you're exactly right. As you know, we— Well, first of all, I meant what I said. I thought the book was brilliant. But go back for a second. You've known the president for 25 years.

3:55Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:Yeah, I've consulted for, as you know, five U.S. presidents, two Republicans, three Democrats and Trump. I was the original critic, if you will, of The Apprentice as Jeff Zucker when he was running MS. Well, he was running as NBC Universal and Jack Welch asked him to go and steal the Survivor TV show from CBS that was making a fortune with very low costs. and he said, I can't get it, but I can get the producer, Mark Burnett, and we'll just recreate, throw him off the island in the business world. So the Wall Street Journal had me write a review of each week's episode that NBC sent me a day in advance.

4:30Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:Believe it or not, Donald Trump was a little sensitive to criticism when I referred to it as a musical chairs game at a Hooters restaurant, with the sexist overlay and the throw him off the island elimination game premise. If you're trying to kill off your co-workers, you have nobody left to lead at the end, but that was the selection process. But weirdly enough, long story short, we got friendly after he was threatening me all kinds of ways. We had a meeting of the mind and you know how that can be backstage. Donald Trump can be extraordinarily charming. And he decided that I have very little in the way of resources of value to him.

5:04Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:I'm interested more in influence than affluence. And he offered me the presidency at Trump university. I said, no, that's not going to be it. But I suggested to him, the celebrity apprentice idea to take it away from putting engaging young millennials in this ridiculous zero-sum throw-em-off-the-island setup. He liked it. I said, you know, I didn't care for Andrew Dice Clay or Jackie Mason or those kind of comics. I said, put them together. That became the Celebrity Apprentice concept. And we stayed friendly then through the years. And up until this interview, I still haven't yet had my major IRS general compliance on it.

5:35Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:So I've gotten away with it. But I've been critical of him, like you, about two-thirds, at least two-thirds of the time. And every now and then, I think he gets it right and deserves the credit for certain things. So Jared Kushner is the one who told me to actually write this book. He said, you know, nobody understands my father-in-law as much as you do. He is unorthodox. So and he doesn't operate the way other CEOs do. So I've known him longer than anybody in Trump 1.0. As you know, our old friend, Peter Navarro, I actually introduced him to Donald Trump. Wilbur Ross knew him longer. He's the only person in Trump 1.0.

6:07Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:And Trump 2.0, I've known him longer, I guess, family members in 1.0. But that's how I got into it all. All right. I want to go to something in the book, which I think people underappreciate about the president. And even though I'm generally at odds with the president, I do agree with you that what looks like chaos is actually calculated strategy in many ways. Sometimes it's just chaos for the sake of chaos to throw people off the strategy. But there is a lot of calculation that goes on here. And so what was the specific behavior that made you see that pattern that you so aptly describe in the book?

6:47Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:He's a master of illusion. Harry Houdini and P.T. Barnum had nothing on him in terms of knowing how to create distraction, smoke, mirrors. One of the things he uses that was studied here in the 1950s at the Yale School of Communications, mass communications that used to exist, was studying whatever worked in the 1930s in Germany. As you tell smart people both sides of the story and then plant some fatal flaws in the argument on one side. So a sophisticated audience thinks they're hearing both sides, but in fact, they're driven to one answer. An unsophisticated audience doesn't have the time or interest to get into the details.

7:22Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:You tell them one side and both sides, you just keep hammering the same message. So eventually you can get 20 % of the country to believe that the elections were rigged in 2020, even though all the down ballot candidates seem to be just right. It's just the top of the ballot that Trump says was rigged. How that could possibly happen is ludicrous. 64 courts, including 12 that were dominated by Trump appointed judges, as well as what was it now? 17 different audits and recounts. Nothing ever went his way on it yet. He still and of course, all the senior lieutenants from Attorney General Barr to Chris Krebs, the head of cybersecurity and election security.

8:06Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:Everybody told him it was a fair and free election, but yet he can still get 20 % of the country to believe that or to believe that Haitian refugees are eating their neighbor's pets in Springfield, Ohio, even though the police commissioner, the mayor, and the governor, all Republicans, say this is false. But by repeating these false messages, that's something Trump is very good at. So right now he's trying to tell us that that Iran has agreed to suspend nuclear weapons or on the telling us that's not true. But some people, Trump will keep arguing that and they'll start to believe it. Thank you for tuning in to Open Book.

8:41And if you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week. We've got a lot more coming. And now back to the show. Listen, he has said that to me. You've heard it as well. he'll repeat himself even if the information is inaccurate he likes doing that particularly if it's about himself if it's something negative going on with him he'll repeat something positive he he objectively lost the debate to count that is a key insight right now even something negative

9:10Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:you know that's very very interesting nuance you raised there there i have got colleagues academics psychiatrists people call him a sociopath political scientist call him a demagogue or an autocrat What does that get you to put labels on him? Whatever it is, is that if you're a CEO or if you're a trader, you just have to figure out how do I make sense out of all this? What's coming out of all this? And we can already see that he's the most consequential person alive today. If Vladimir Putin is probably the most evil person alive today or right up there, Donald Trump, he can move markets. We know that in Liberation Day, that was 18, 22 percent of the market moved instantly on that.

9:46Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:And similarly, just on Monday, we saw a 6 % market move as he changes his mind on a Monday morning. And that's a predictable pattern. He goes on a Friday night because he judges himself by the yardstick of financial metrics. No president has ever been like this before, but financial metrics. So that is our chapter four, is how does he measure his success? When he sees the bad news, he announces only on Fridays. And I've told the executive producers of almost all the Sunday news shows, you have his stories lined up on the domestic economy that's not looking good for Trump. Forget it. That's not going to be your script when Sunday rolls around.

10:18Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:And they've now admitted to me, just about every one of them has admitted to me, that I was right, that he's going to change that narrative by kicking the ball down the court, doing something down the field, doing something different. They'll lead the entire news media to chase it. And they will. And they wipe out all their plans on Friday are different when they get around to Sunday. He'll come out with a different story, whether or not it's going to be Greenland or Iran. Now, nobody's in favor of Maduro and Venezuela. People see that Greenland has advantages, but and certainly in Venezuela, Venezuela, you know, he's a bad guy in Iran who wants them to have the nuclear weaponry capability or or the support they had for their proxies for terrorism from Hamas, Houthis and Hezbollah.

10:58Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:But still, everybody in his administration admits there's nothing imminent on any of these fronts. The timing is entirely driven by changing the narrative. He's the only person we'll ever know in history that will try to change a negative narrative on himself with even more negative news. People try to substitute a true or false with positive news. He'll actually shoot himself in one foot so he don't look at the other foot, as he did with the Obama racial caricatures. That was pure distraction. There's no reason he needed to put that out. But again, it's on a Friday night. He threw off all the Sunday news shows to talk about the racism there.

11:32Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:And he figured he doesn't care. He'll come up with something by Monday that I have people talking about something else. OK, so we both see that. I agree with everything you just said. I guess the I feel like people fall into two two camps. One camp dismisses him apropos to what you said about some of the political scientists and psychiatrists. They they he sort of comes across chaotic, Jeff or unserious. And then the other camp is almost like they treat him unstoppable. But you're in a new camp, frankly, you you see the nuances in between those two things. So give us another give us more definition on that.

12:14Tell us a little bit about the different commandments.

12:15Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:I need to be agreeing with you consistently on this. But it's truly, Anthony, in some ways, I mean, we were talking not to reveal anything that I didn't clear with you in advance almost daily when you were working on the campaign with the desk by Peter Navarro. We were comparing notes because and you knew that I was pretty close to Trump started calling me nonstop in late spring of 2015. Should he run? And I said, look, I think you'll get 15 percent, maybe 20 percent like Ross Perot and will crest there. And he said, that's what Melania says. She says I should run also. I said, no, I didn't say that.

12:47Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:I said, you're going to cry. But he wanted to hear it differently. And then you were talking about how you were trying to make sense when you were working sleeplessly on the campaign at that point. And some things just weren't adding up. And that is what's interesting is that as you were realizing and I was realizing is that this guy is not crazy. He delivers things with an emotional outburst, and maybe he's slurring his language a little bit more than he did, and maybe he's not articulating things, perhaps with the same precision, not that it was ever that precise, at age 79 as he did when he was 29.

13:24Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:But it's not his cognitive issues that are the issue. He is dumb as a fox. For people who think, we have many mutual friends that write him off as stupid. but he would not win the geometry contest or the geology contest or geography contest. In fact, at Wharton here or Penn or NYU or Syracuse or Michigan State or anywhere, he wouldn't win the geography contest, but big deal. He listens very well. I went in with left of center political scientists from here. The name of Jacob Hacker was one, for example, as they, and I said, you're going to be charmed by him. And of course they were. And he was pumping them for information about gerrymandering.

14:01Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:He walked out thinking, gosh, he really wants to reform us. And no, he's really listening to how gerrymandering works. But I don't think reform was his agenda. But is that he is incredibly smart. He listens and he learns. He's not well informed on a lot of things, but he he plays off people. He listens to a wide variety of sources. He doesn't want to be humiliated. you know and this was i don't want to blame the victim for example zelensky played him of course the wrong way zelensky is entitled uh he's a truly heroic figure entitled to feel angry and resentful of the way some of the world is treating him but he still has to recognize where he is relative to donald trump you you can't go in there as a scold and uh and and if there's anything trump hates more as you know than losing money and there's not much it's losing pride he's got to be treated with with more respect than perhaps a lot of people think he deserves that grandiosity is really important.

14:52Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:But with these principles, these 10 principles, he comes back to them time after time. They're completely predictable. People in the news business, people in the CEO community, and traders are constantly surprised with each day's headlines. And we keep telling them you shouldn't be. This is predictable. These are strategic, deliberate choices that look like emotional impulses. In fact, even though he has a temper, these are carefully chosen responses. He knows what he's doing on these fronts. It doesn't mean they're the right thing, by the way. A lot of times they backfire on him. Sometimes they work for him.

15:27Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:You know, the trade negotiations with China asking for 185 % tariffs. He knew he wasn't going to get that, but he gets 37 % across the board. It was 32 before. In his mind, I wouldn't get the 37 if I didn't smack him so hard in the beginning. And that's what he's doing with Iran right now. So we're going to wipe out all your electrical power generation facilities to get people's attention. Nobody negotiates like that. That's what he, by deliberate choice, does. He, instead of building trust, I'm an old boy scout, you build trust with kindling and branches, and you put on some light logs and a big, heavy green log at the end.

16:07Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:Not Trump. He starts with that big, heavy green log. He doesn't build trust to fire trust. He smacks you in the nose with it so that everything else looks reasonable after that. Is that a smart way to negotiate? He thinks it works for him. This podcast is all about books. And while we're on that subject, I have a new book coming out this September called All the Wrong Moves. It's a personal look at how we got to this moment in America through big decisions, bad bets, and a lot of political misfires. I've had a front row seat for plenty of it. And I wrote All the Wrong Moves to try to make sense of where we are and more importantly, how we can move forward.

16:44It's available for pre-order now. We'll drop some links in the description below. And I'm excited for you to read it. I hope you'll consider buying it. It causes a lot of chaos. But yes, I think in ways it has worked for him. And he's gotten to the presidency twice. Some of that, frankly, is related to the selection of candidates that the Democrats have put forth in addition to his political success. So it's both. But the one thing that you're saying about the tariffs that I, you know, and we can table this, but the tariffs were illegal. Supreme Court said they were illegal. the section 121 that he's going to use now for the towers will also he'll also lose that in court so he does do some things that are outside of the box in a constitutional system which you know i don't know if that's necessarily efficacious but let's go to something that i

17:31Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:think on that one before you lose the trend on that because that's a very important point that's our chapter one is he doesn't believe in experts authorities uh uh and and when you were there at Trump 1.0, you saw at least there are some people with the guardrails and Trump 2.0. You don't have that. So you have even more of a centralization of power. It is like a hub with spokes coming off of it. You remember the founder of Airbnb this month, two years ago, was arguing about founder mode. Yeah, I know. And you yourself have many entrepreneurial impulses, but you also refer to experts and you have a temperate approach to the two.

18:03Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:He just believes that he knows better than all else. And if he hits walls, then he'll do something different. Some call him the Roomba president. And he moves to hit a wall and he bounces off and he'll come back and hit it to get a different way. But to that point, I just didn't want to lose you on that because I thought you raised a really good point about the hub was folks. When he won the presidency, Mike Bloomberg called him. And Mike was very rough on him at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia in 2016. And Trump got on the phone with him. It was generally polite. He was telling Mike how rough he was.

18:34And Mike said, well, none of that's neither here nor there. now you're the president i wish you great success and then mike said please go out and hire people that are smarter than you and what did trump say to mike there is nobody smarter than me that's what he said okay and that's verified i was in the room other people were in the room maggie haberman put it in her book obviously mike bloomberg verified that he said it because i i was there and saw it so that's how he thinks and that is antithetical to the ceos these sort of servant leaders that you've put in in your seminars you know take somebody like the the ceo that you just honored from delta airlines uh ed bastion yeah ed bastion as an example he's servant leader uh let's go to those people for a second you've been pretty blunt that the ceos in your network are deeply uncomfortable with donald trump's leadership style uh they're not going to say so though, Jeff, you know that for fear of retribution, what does the silence cost American institutions long-term?

19:38Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:Okay. I'm so glad you asked this one because since we've got an hour or two to go in this conversation, because this is a big one. We got 10 hours to go on a conversation like this. You've asked, you've opened a big wedge on this one in this. I don't know. I think it's are chapter six or something like that, is Trump hates coalitions. He hates them. He doesn't like what allied forces can do to him. As Benjamin Franklin wisely advised, if we don't hang together, we shall surely hang separately. And Trump sees the opposite side of that message. He sees it from the point of view of the king. He doesn't want people to be allied the way the patriots were in 1776.

20:17Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:And he doesn't like NAFTA. He doesn't like NATO. He doesn't even like USMCA that he authored, trying to still start up trouble between Canada and Mexico, the Germany versus France or the EU versus the UK or, or whatever, or the Republicans going at it with each other right now, as they're caught up in whether or not how to, how to, how to, how to, how to handle the, the current legislative stalemate that could open up the TSA as funding is he just likes to create wedges. And when the CEOs come along and in 2020, as you know, there was a constitutional crisis in that almost tore apart the country.

20:54Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:The election was it was a November 4th on a Tuesday and the absentee ballots, as everybody knows, he just voted absentee ballot again yesterday in Florida, but he trashes absentee ballots. If you believed in science and COVID, you're less likely to want to go to a congregate place like a polling place in 2020. So the absentee ballots favored the Democrats, favored Biden-Harris, and the in-place polling looked more favorable to Trump. So Trump called and he couldn't count the ballots until after the polling places closed because of a lot of Republican legislatures like Pennsylvania made that the case.

21:28Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:So he called the fraudulent on Wednesday the next day, saying the absentee ballots are all fraud. And Thursday declared himself the winner. That was considered a coup d 'etat. Many CEOs, I don't just mean two or three, the absolute largest people you could think of in media, the very biggest people you could think of from finance to pharma, from retail to travel, transportation, hospitality, even the consultants and lawyers were calling, of all people, me. I said, why don't you call the major trade groups? And they said, no, they've got too much staff that doesn't want to start fights. They don't want any controversy.

22:02Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:It means too much work. And I think they felt that maybe I have nothing to lose, just no reputation or wealth to lose. And so we called 100 CEOs. We got 93 in 12 hours the next day. Many of them on the West Coast and most of them on the East Coast, several in the center of the country, some of them in their pajamas, on a Zoom call at seven in the morning the next morning, Friday the 7th. And they had tremendous collective action. They came out with a five-point position. As it's been reported in the press, Doug McMillan, who was then the CEO of Walmart, was the chairman of the Business Roundtable.