Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - The Strategic Genius Behind Trump's Chaos - Jeffrey Sonnenfeld

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

This episode is about understanding something most people get wrong about Donald Trump: what looks like chaos is often very deliberate. I sat down with Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who’s studied Trump for decades, to break down the strategy, the psychology, and the playbook behind it all. Whether you agree with him or not, you need to understand how he operates. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the Senior Associate Dean for Leadership Studies and Lester Crown Professor in Management Practice at the Yale School of Management, as well as founder and president of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute, a nonprofit educational and research institute focused on CEO leadership and corporate governance. He has authored eight books and his work is regularly cited by the general media such as: BusinessWeek, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, the Economist, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC as well as PBS, and he is a staff contributor for CNBC and a staff columnist for FORTUNE, TIME, Chief Executive, and Corporate Board Member. Get his new book, Trump's Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox, which is out today, March 31, 2026, here: https://a.co/d/083MxKTx I blurbed the book, saying, "I was charmed by Donald Trump, worked for him, and then also saw his dangerous flaws. Some treat him as the village idiot or a madman because of his unorthodox impulses, and that he may not have been the top finance, econ, or history student at Wharton. Critics are as wrong to discount his communication genius and street savvy as others are to deify him. Sonnenfeld is the first scholar to reveal just how Trump operates, the method behind the magic and malice—lessons needed to protect our nation.” Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. 📚Pre-order my next book, All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump, out on the 17th of September in the UK and the 22nd of September in the US: ⁠https://linktr.ee/anthonyscaramucci Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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so I can stress less during tax season or any season. Plan started just $12 a month. Learn more at tellus.com slash online security. No one can prevent all cybercrime or identity theft. conditions apply. 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.

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. is you tell smart people both sides of the story and I've planned 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

and 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. So eventually you can get 20% of the country to believe that the elections were rigged in 2020. He's the only person will 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. 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 University in 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?

And then we'll talk about the arguments that you're making in it. 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? 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 cost. 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. 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, you know, with the sexist overview overlay and the throw them 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. I'm interested more in influence and 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 him off the island set up. 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. 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 a 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 first. father-in-law as much as you do. He is unorthodox. 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 from the Wilbur Ross knew him longer. It's the only person in Trump 1.0 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? 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 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 always 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. So eventually, you can get 20% of the country to believe that the elections were rigged in 2020, even though all the down-valid 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,

as what was it now, 17 different audits and recounts. Nothing ever went his way on it yet he still. And of course, all of his senior lieutenants from Attorney General Barr to Chris Krebs, the head of cybersecurity and election security. 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 Iran has agreed to suspend nuclear weapons. Or Iran's 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 an open book. And 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 comment. 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 objectively lost the debate to kind of... That is a key insight right now, even something negative. You know, that's very, very interesting nuance you raised there. I have colleagues, academics, psychiatrists, people call him a sociopath, political scientists,

I'm 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 should 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 are 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. And similarly, just on Monday, we saw 6 percent. a 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 ardstick 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 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. 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 that'll lead the entire news media to chase it. And they will.

And they wipe out there. All their plans on Friday are different when they get around the 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 Medoro and Venezuela. People see that Greenland has advantages. And certainly, you know, in Venezuela, Venezuela, he's a bad guy. in Iran who wants them to have the nuclear weaponry capability or the support they had for their proxies for terrorism or from Hamas, Houthis, and Hezbollah.

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 will 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. He'll come up with something by Monday that I have people talking about something else.

Okay. So we both see that. I agree with everything you just said. I guess the, I feel like people fall into two camps. One camp dismisses him apropos to what you said about some of the political scientists and psychiatrists.

They, he sort of comes across chaotic Jeff or unsirious. And then the other camp is almost like they treat them unstoppable. But you're in a new camp, frankly. You see the nuances in between those two things. So give us more definition on that. Tell us a little bit about the different commandments. 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 a desk by Peter Navarro, we were comparing notes because, and you knew that I was pretty close. The Trump started calling me nonstop in late spring of 2015, should he run? And I said, look, I think you'll get 15%, maybe 20% like Ross Perot in El Crest there. And he said, that's what Melania is. She says, she says I should run also. I said, no, I didn't say that. 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 there was ever that precise at age 79 as he did when he was 29. But it's not his cognitive issues that are the issue. He is dumb as a fox or people who think he's, we have many mutual friends that write him off as stupid. 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. in state or anywhere. He wouldn't win the geography contest, but big deal. He is a, 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. He walked out thinking, gosh, he really wants to reform. I said, 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. A listens and he learns. He's not well-informed on a lot of things, but he plays off people. He listens to a wide variety of sources. He doesn't want to be humiliated. I don't want to blame the victim, for example, Zelensky played him, of course, the wrong way. Zelensky is entitled. 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 can't go in there as a scold. 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 more respect than perhaps a lot of people think he deserves. That grandiosity is really important. 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 at 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. 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. 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 scy. You build trust with kinder and tindling and branches and you put on some light logs and a big

heavy green log at the end. Not Trump. He starts with that big heavy green log. He doesn't build trust, the fire of 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. It'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 that. 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 tariffs 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 think is. On that one, before you lose the trend of that, because that's a very important point. That's our chapter one is he doesn't believe in experts, authorities. 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. 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 tempered approach to the two. He just believes that he knows better than all else. And if he hits wall,

that he'll do something different. Some call him the Rumba president, that 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 with 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. And Mike said, well, none of that's neither here and they're 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 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. Ed Bastion. Ed Bastion as an example, a servant leader. 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. 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. 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 ago 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 our chapter six or something like that, is Trump hates coalitions. It 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 way the patriots were in 1776. And he doesn't like NAFTA. He doesn't like NATO. It doesn't even like USMCA that he authored trying to still stir up trouble between Canada and Mexico. The Germany versus France or the EU versus the UK or whatever. Or the Republicans going at it with each other right now. Is there caught up and whether or not how to have had it had a had, handle 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, in 2020, as you know, there was a constitutional crisis that almost tore apart the country. The election was September 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 congregate a 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 place is closed because of a lot of Republican legislatures like Pennsylvania made out the case. So he called it

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 can 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. 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. So 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 7 in the morning, the next morning, Friday the 7th. And they had tremendous collective action. They came out to a five-point position as it's been reported in the press. Doug McMillan, who is then the CEO of Walmart, was the chairman of the Business Roundtable. This was despite the business roundtable. They authored five points. This is the largest election in American history.

We're happy to have had a big part in making it and free and clear and honest with paid time off. Secondly, if anybody charges about there being fraud, they should bring those allegations to the courts. Third, they should bring evidence. And fourth, we see no evidence of systematic fraud. And fifth and last should be speedy transfer of power. The CEOs are very effective in calibrating the truth then. And before even Pelosi and Schumer could congratulate the winners, the very next day, Friday the 8th, is when the Pennsylvania electors were certified, re-certified on a recount.

And Biden Harris were declared the winners. Then the CEO community came out with the statement, B.B. Netanyahu, Xi Jinping is Bush 43. They took our exact storyboard. They used that exact five points, exact five points. And that's certified the truth. CEOs can do that. They did that for other occasions that year. Now, they aren't doing it right now, and it hurts them. You can see that just in the last several months, they've gone after Jamie Diamond at J.P. Morgan.

How formidable. They're going after Brian Moynihan, Bank of America. They've gone after David Solomon of Goldman Sachs. They've gone after James Quincy of Coca-Cola. The CEO of Harley Davidson, like what? These are all great iconic U.S. firms. But Harley Davidson, they're very symbol. The very mascot is the bald eagle.

And because the CEO there, Matt Leviton, couldn't get bicycles, you know, motorcycles all made in the U.S. into Europe because of reciprocal trade barriers against Trump's tariffs. He had to open up a factory in Thailand and ship them in from there and shut one down in Kansas City. Trump took that as a personal affront and said, don't buy Harleys. Their riders lean MAGA for Harley and their work is ironically lean somewhat anti-Maga. He just non-political guy loses his job because the stock plummets and this board fired him. That's a cautionary tale. That's why they can't act alone. They have to act together. And it's amazing that you could have these companies like Delta, Coca-Cola,

J.P. Morgan, and Walmart and others not have the courage to act together. And that's what they need to do. And they somehow forgot that this year, but they have done it well in the past. But there's another part of this. Where's everybody else, Anthony? Only we have a big No King's rally coming up this weekend. That could be a pretty big demonstration of the counter argument on making. Because until we saw in Minneapolis, we saw the whole community activists out there, along with 60 CEOs from Cargill and Target and Medtronic, these major Minnesota companies came out against the ICE abuses, the murders in the media, that we need to see more of that.

But it isn't just the CEOs. The social change of the 1960s was led by social change with arms locked together. If your life depended on, my life dependent on, we couldn't name 10 clergy that have gone on the public scene. We'll name two or three. Where's everybody else? In the 1960s and 70s, we could. We're the trade union leaders.

Where are the professional associations. We're all the neighborhood activists. They're not there. So don't blame the CEOs. CEOs are hired hands. There are a couple of oligarchs that have ownership control of their companies. Most of them are hardworking people. Some of them overpaid, maybe.

But still, they're working for their boards. If they only hear from red state treasurer, red state attorneys general, they have to hear from the blue state pressures, too. Well, I mean, you know, listen, and crinently well said, And have you found you've been an advisor and a critic? So this is sort of an interesting position that you're in. And you've managed, in my opinion, maintain credibility in both camps. But it has writing this book cost you relationships on either side?

Surprisingly not yet. There's one constituency because we just got a warning from our publisher, Simon & Schuster. It looks like they could be running out of stocks. So if anybody wants it, hurry up, go out and buy it. is to our surprise, because initially on Amazon, candidly, it was selling, but it was right now. It wasn't selling like this a few weeks ago. I don't know what's happened right now, but it's moving very quickly. And as you know, apparently Amazon takes this inventory they hold for fulfillment later.

They're warning us for all the large bulk orders we're going to need for campus talks and things to get them now because we're running out of stock. And the book is only shipping right now. The release date is a week from yesterday, the 31st. So it, so it, congratulations. Thank you. But California bookstores, just for some talks we're doing out in California, we're doing a big talk at the battery there for the tech community and stuff. Initially, we're having trouble getting books there because the bookstores didn't want to carry it

because they said, this is too pro-Trump because it's a flattering image here. And I said, you can't judge a book by its cover. Take a look at what Anthony Scaramucci had to say on the back or what, about the Dean of Constitutional Law. Lawrence Tribe has to say here, or Michael Cohen has, you know, plenty of other sources here. CEOs of Procter & Gamble,

chairman of Disney, a lot of people to look at there, Xerox and things have other points of view on this book. But anyhow, some of the, the only thing that worried is... Listen, I think what I love about the book, so many different things I love about the book, but you have a thesis and you're backing up the thesis with facts,

and you're backing up the thesis with real stories, and you're describing, it in a way that I think we need. If you don't mind me saying so, I feel like we have insubstantial analytics around Donald Trump. The left has substantial analytics around him and the right. And so what this book does is it comes right in the middle with a gigantic ginsu knife and slices through everything and gives people, I think, a very objective way to look at the situation based on a 50-year-old. observation. So for those reasons, this is not whispered gossip that a good friend of mine, Bob

Woodward would put in a book. It's not John Bolton coming out with as a disenchanted former insider. This is actually, I'm the first, this is hard to believe. The first and only leadership scholar, and this is what I've done for 50 years as a leadership scholar, is to critique him as a leader and taking a look at just what he does. And as you say, factually what he does, it's not pointing names, it's not pointing fingers, is not calling names. It's pretty harsh. It's pretty rough. It's pretty rough, but it's pretty accurate. I mean, it's 100% accurate. Every statement is factually annotated and documented. And you can see that it's the same behaviors over time. And that kind of a leadership critique needs to be out there. So far, I have not gotten the general compliance

audit. And I'm hoping that you're right. I don't offend. But I mean, I have had a lot of home vandalism. I have so many cameras around my house, security cameras by Yale and since I can't even have my shirt tails on talk. But most of that was from Putin supporters, whoever they are. So I haven't heard from people on either side of the aisle condemning this yet. Ironically, it seems that both sides see something in here, but I don't know how long that'll be maintained. Well, you know, I'll just say this to you, and I think you'll get this, you know, we used to joke with Trump that he has written more bestselling books than he's actually read. So he's not going to read your book. Someone will read it to him and they'll say there's one sentence in there

that's off-putting and so therefore he'll hate the book. But it's really not. It's actually a pretty fair treatise on him. Well, if he does sue us, I guess it'll help drive sales, won't it? Yeah, it probably would, but, you know, he's a little occupied right now. All right. So we're down to the point of the podcast, sir, where I come up with five words, me and my producer, they're from your book. I need you to do a Rothschild test, just a sentence or two in the context, of course, of your book. I say the word leadership. You say what? Making meaning and integrity is how people have something to believe in. Loyalty.

And I mean it loyalty to a person to person loyalty. That's exactly. The loyalty should be to an institution. It should be to a cause, to a religion, to a family, but not a cult-like worship of a single deified individual, no matter what kind of grandiosity they have. Nobody ever called Alexander III of Macedonia, Alexander the Great, until he called himself that and started to believe it. Okay. Influence. I say the word influence. Influence, it's how you pull different levers to have impact on other people, to persuade them

to do something they weren't necessarily about to do on their own. But in whose interest is the influence is a lot of the question. Is it going to be self-interested or are you influencing people to do something good for a larger cause? Power. Power is the question of what are the, what are the breaks on it? What are the limits? Are they countervailing forces? Whether or not it's checks and balances on power. There needs to be a question of not how do you build a power base, but how do you control it? What are the limits to it? A big downside of my field coming off of the Second World War is they thought that charismatic leaders were evil. So we stopped studying in significant individuals. Wherever you go in the world, you see a monument not to a task force or

committee, but to a single bold thinking individual. But what are the breaks on that person? How do you control them. And I'm going to give you the last word, Trump. Trump is a person who is playing the game. He's not an ideologue. He's certainly not a conservative. He's certainly not a liberal. He is somebody who is perhaps the greatest opportunist in history that he seizes the moment and he's extremely canny and successful, dumb as a fox, and doesn't care about building social capital that other people do. And Tocqueville came to the country. He said the most important thing

that makes American democracy work is trust in the system, social capital, more important than financial capital. That isn't something that Trump worries about. All right. Listen is a great book.

I wish you tremendous success. Congratulations on the early sales. The title of the book is Trump's Ten Commandment, strategic lessons from the Trump leadership toolbox. Jeff Soneville. Thank you again for joining us on Open Book. Anthony,

thank you so much. questions. I loved every second of it. When a country's productivity cycle is broken, people feel it in their paychecks, their communities, their futures. What does this mean for individuals, communities, and businesses across the country? Join business leaders, policymakers, and influencers for CGs' national series on the Canadian Standard of Living, productivity and innovation. Learn what's driving Canada's productivity decline and discover actionable solutions to reverse it.