Joanna Coles (2:57)

Okay, so one of the leadership tools he uses, and you break them down into ten commandments. One of them is that he flips his foes. You were a foe of his. You started writing critically about him when. When he started the Apprentice at the Wall Street Journal. And he then very cleverly actually reached out to you. You pick up the story from here.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (3:20)

Well, I can't believe you know that part of it is.

Joanna Coles (3:22)

Well, it's in the book. I read the book.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (3:24)

The part that I didn't put in the book. But just since we're close friends and just between us is just between US

Joanna Coles (3:31)

and 450,000 people on the podcast audience.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (3:33)

Oh, that's fantastic. Get some more books. Call the publisher.

Joanna Coles (3:36)

That's just YouTube.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (3:37)

I actually went down to Mar a Lago just after he bought it with Steve Forbes to brainstorm ideas about what he might do with it. I didn't know him before then and I thought his grandiose plans were crazy, but Jeff Zucker knew I had that relationship. Jeff Zucker, in his pre CNN days, you remember, and before he was the CEO of Katie Couric Inc. He was the head of cnn, NBC, head of NBC Universal, of NBC Universal, Jack Welch, head of GE, owned it, said, get me that show, pointing to CBS's Survivor. And he said, I can't. They own Mark Burnett, the producer. We can't get him. So Zucker hired him to put him in a business setting, hired Burnett and then he said, jeff, will you write a weekly column? We'll get and I'll give it from NBC. We'll give you the show a day in advance. And the Wall Street Journal then will print as under Paul Steiger's era, will print your review each week and give us the leadership lessons. Well, you know, I wasn't reading Spy that often with our friends Graydon Carter and Kurt Anderson, but I knew that they had labeled him the Donald and he was part of it and, you know, cognoscenti or at least a glitterati. But I thought, sure, I'll take a look at it. I didn't realize how flamboyant and reprehensible a lot of his approaches were. So as I was watching it, I thought, this is crazy. The only way you win and be selected as a leader is by killing off your own team. It's an elimination game. It's like Lord of the Flies by Golding, reading it over and over again like this is. We already got that lesson. There's not much of a lesson here. So I thought that the first column was called Last Emperor Trump and it was then the first place where in the Wall Street Journal where I said he's going to run for president. He liked that part, but he didn't like the fact that I said that this is basically a musical chairs game at a Hooters restaurant is the sexist overlay and the elimination game premise. I thought it was really problematic as lessons. And he blew up. If you can imagine, he's sensitive to criticism. Who would have known? So then they said, no more, you can't do the next week. But then the Wall Street Journal was so happy with the traffic, they said, let him try it next week, maybe he'll recant. So Trump said, okay, if he rescinds what he wrote. I said, no, all right, I'll take a look. I said, you know, I said I wouldn't rescind. I was wrong. He was right. Last week I said that was the worst possible portrait on television I could imagine for young people to emulate for business leadership. But I hadn't seen this week's episode yet. So then he then started calling and threatening and we'd go off to unexpectedly Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia or Sao Paulo, Brazil. I'd be why they were asking me to give a talk bewildered me because they were bringing him in from another door to restage battles we were having on Nightline or Dateline or Today show or whatever. And he was getting increasingly hostile, threatening and litigious. You remember Tim o' Brien, who's now at Bloomberg, was the deputy business editor at the New York Times. And he had revealed at the exact same time that Trump wasn't worth at that time what he purported to be worth. And Trump had him in endless litigation. And I thought, oh, I don't need this. So he starts calling me. I did the only grown up thing, which was to ignore the calls and my admin at the day. We had an up and down relationship. She now works for a Nobel Prize winner. So we both had an upgrade is she put the call through maliciously and it was him threatening me. And he said, I said, look, let's just agree to disagree. After he went through his blue streak, we've already said everything. And he said, not so fast. I said, oh, no. He Said, how would you like to become. He said, you're someone such a bright young fellow. I said, oh, can you repeat that? He said, which part? I said, either part. I don't get that so much.

Joanna Coles (6:56)

Flattery, Very Trumpian. And also reaching out directly. Very Trumpian. Right, which is important. He does that with reporters in a way that no other president does. His transparency. And you're a perfect answer.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (7:09)

You have that exactly. A lot of times after we became friends, I would go into Trump Tower and bring left of center political scientists and sociologists who said, you're going to walk out liking this guy. They said, no way. They always did. Jacob Hacker, just to name one. Left of center.

Joanna Coles (7:24)

You liked him too, right? You wrote this. Your friendship with him started because you wrote something incredibly critical because he's a terrible businessman. And let's not forget you have a long list of the businesses that go belly up in here. And he had, you know, his companies had six bankruptcies, not least his Atlantic casinos, where the House always wins, except not in Donald Trump's case. But he actually, he flipped you as a foe. And then one of the other things you talk about in the book is flattery. He reached out to you and said,

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (7:54)

reach out to me.

Joanna Coles (7:54)

Become the. The chancellor or the president of Trump University.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (7:59)

Can you believe that? He asked me to come to the president. I said, well, mom would have always liked me to be a university president, but this is not the right next step. And he said, do you play golf? I'm a terrible golfer. It doesn't match my disposition. He said, I'll teach you. I thought, I don't need that. But I thought, I don't need the litigation either. So I went there, and my wife at the time, who was a single ditched handicap golfer, and a colleague of mine who's a very mathematical economist, one of the brightest people I know, and if you don't believe me, just ask him. And I thought, he'll wear out Trump. And sure enough, they both were charmed by him. And he said, look, your friends like me. What's it take to win you over? I said, look, I can't get bought. My wife started kicking me, find out how much. And I just said, look, it's the premise.

Joanna Coles (8:38)

Ex wife, right?

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (8:39)

She is.

Joanna Coles (8:40)

That's what you said.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (8:41)

So that was the setup. So I just said, why don't you just get these fallen celebrities? Like, I've hated ethnic humor. Andrew Dice Clay and Joan Rivers and Don Rickles and Jackie Mason. I've always hated that kind of humor. Get them Their, their careers are collapsing. That became the, the origins of the Celebrity Apprentice, which he admits now they got no royalties from it. But we became friends after that. I did bring him into one CEO summit where the top brass there, the major company CEOs, many of whom are still office today, said if he walks in here to the Waldorf, we're walking out. He walked in, they walked out. And then of course, when he won, he didn't mind having me come over to see. They're all coming to see him now that he is president.

Joanna Coles (9:19)

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Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (9:22)

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Joanna Coles (9:34)

Well, one of the fascinating aspects of the book is how he takes his foes and brings them onto his side. So J.D. vance, he makes him obviously vice president. J.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (9:46)

Little Marco.

Joanna Coles (9:47)

Well, and J.D. vance has called him the new Hitler. Yeah, right. Little Rubio, Little Marco has gone after him even after his penis size, which sort of takes the debates to a new low. But Trump single handedly picks them up, brings them on side. I wanted you to talk about how he does that, that he has this charm, that one. There's a very interesting chapter where you talk about what Trump is like one on one, behind closed doors. Now, he obviously charmed you. You had written very critically about his show and how it was the opposite of what a business show should be. But there he is, there you are playing golf. He persuades you, he wants you on side.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (10:29)

He's punking the public. He's aware of it. And when he brings you backstage, he lets you know that he doesn't take any of it seriously, but he's trying to get away with whatever he can get away with. He told me, and I have it on video, that he was going to go to the left of Bernie Sanders. He thought that was the anger and the populism, but there's populism on the right, too. And it was only with the meltdown of the Ted Cruz campaign that Steve Bannon was free with nothing to do. That took him on a faster route to the right.

Joanna Coles (10:53)

But hold on a minute and then, Stephen, I'll come to you. Don't worry, you're not going to sit there silently. What is it about Trump that made him want to be president and he didn't care? As you point out repeatedly in the book, he's not ideological. So he wanted a route to get there. Why did he want to be President,

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (11:14)

it was a way to make a lot of money. He didn't think he was going to win when he kept calling me and he was calling me more than once a day all the way through 2015. But in the spring of 2015, before that infamous elevator ride in Trump Tower, he called and said, should I run? I said, I think you shouldn't. I think you'll get maybe 15 to 18% like Ross Perot. Maybe you'll crest at 20% till Ross Perot. Perot went nuts about the CIA invading his daughter's wedding, and that'll be it. And he said, yeah, Melania says the same thing. She also thinks I should run. I said, no, no, I didn't say that. And that he was often running. And so that's.

Joanna Coles (11:52)

But what do you think his colonel why does he want to be president? Doesn't really.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (11:56)

The branding value. That's why he wanted it. Well, the first Trump 1.0, and I've known him longer than anybody except family members and Wilbur Ross and Trump 1.0 have long known him longer than anybody in Trump 2.0 presently is that he saw the branding value in Trump 1.0. It was to sell more things and put his name on stuff, the grandiosity. But it's Trump 2.0. It's to keep himself out of prison. That was much of the incentive because of the misconduct in Trump 1.0. This is his deus ex machina. This is how the sevens part and the chariot comes down and takes him out. It was the presidency that people didn't think was possible. That's his way. And this is what upsets me about people thinking that he's an idiot because he would fail the geography contest at Yale and Wharton and anywhere else, just because there's a lot he doesn't know and he is ignorant of a lot of things. He is not stupid. He has incredible street savvy. He has the wisdom of. He's as dumb as a fox. And the fact that he could come back continually from the four bankruptcies, from all the 34, you know, criminal convictions, felony charges. Well, convictions as well as the open ones. And then on top of that, to come back after having been driven from office as he was, you got to say, this guy is doing something. He has some tools. And that's what we find that in the arc of his career, nobody's taking a look at the total pattern. Over the course of his life, he does the same 10 things. There's the philosopher Abraham Kaplan used to talk about the Law of instrument. You give a child a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Trump has 10 hammers, and he's pounding away at them. Sometimes it works for them, often it backfires. Jared Kushner, who I've gotten to know pretty well, just said, jeff, you understand them better than anybody. You should write about this. His style is unorthodox, and people can't counter him. Our friends who are. Who are prominent critics by just putting a category around them, calling him a name is not going to counter it. Or people who want to support him aren't helping him just by honking horns and waving flags. They have to understand him.

Joanna Coles (13:58)

So, Stephen, what did you think when you embarked on this work?

Stephen Tian (14:04)

Well, this has been an incredible, incredible journey. And, Joanna, just to pick up on your previous point about how J.D. vance called Trump America's Hitler. And, of course, Marco Rubio was, you know, mocking his size. There's a chapter in the book called the Fluidity of Friends, Foils, and Foes. And for Trump, all human relationships comes down to power. It's transactional power. That's what matters in relationships. And there's no such thing as permanent friends or permanent enemies or permanent foes or permanent foils. Everything is situational and context dependent. So you look at somebody like J.D. vance and Marco Rubio. Trump understands they command a constituency. They have followers. And Trump thinks it's better to try to drown a squeaky wheel in oil than to try to get rid of that squeaky wheel entirely. And he sees the power of having somebody like J.D. vance, who called him America's Hitler, who is one of the most leading opposition voices within the gop, come and basically physically prostrate themselves in front of the religion that is Trump. And that is such a sign of power for Trump to be able to bring those constituents, bring those followers into Trump's camp. It's why Trump takes such relish in converting former foils into friends. It's also why sometimes he'll drop friends. Take Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin was one of the first, most vocal supporters of Trump's campaign in 2016. This was the first standard bearer of the GOP, the former 2012 vice presidential nominee. And yet, after Trump won the election, Sarah Palin's been publicly vocal. She couldn't even get her calls returned by Trump anymore. She wanted a cabinet position. She never even got her calls returned. She couldn't even get into some of Trump's speeches when she showed up for them. And that's all been public. And it's same thing with Rudy Giuliani, unfortunately. You know, as soon as Rudy Giuliani hit some of his issues, Trump was like, I'm through with him.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (15:51)

Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr. It's a long list.

Stephen Tian (15:53)

A long list.

Joanna Coles (15:53)

No, he drops people very quickly. So one of the things I'm really curious about that you build a case for in the book, which I think a lot of CEOs do. Just looking at him through the CEO lens, the leadership lens, is he surrounds himself. Certainly in Trump 2. It wasn't the case in Trump 1, but in Trump 2, with people who would not be in any normal cabinet, they don't have the experience, they don't have any expertise, they don't have the sophistication. So he knows that they are unlikely to be a threat to him. Can you talk about that with. With Pete Hegseth, seeing as we're now in the middle of. Well, potentially in the middle. Could be at the end. Or are we at the beginning of a war with Iran?

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (16:37)

This is exactly where we start the book. In chapter one, there's a tribal, positively, you call it perhaps entrepreneurial focus. With him, with the hub at the center and spokes coming off like a wheel, you rarely see that. Martha Stewart had once at one of our CEO summits, drawn her organization model, which is very similar to Donald Trump's. And they, for a little while, in fact, were business partners. But it is. Well.

Joanna Coles (17:02)

And she replaced him on a series at the Apprentice. Right. And he gleefully took pleasure in the fact that her ratings weren't as high.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (17:08)

No. And then he set her up on her own show, and that failed when they turned on each other. But that's right. She wasn't mean enough for him, which is amazing. But it's. He. He wants people to have a filial piety back to him. They don't have any legitimacy. They're not anchored as experts in any field.

Joanna Coles (17:24)

No.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (17:24)

There nobody who is in the world of military strategy that considers Pete Hexeth other than a person with an alcohol problem that had a weekend Fox News post and has a lot of rough language and abuse of religion. But they don't quite understand why he's in this job. But he has a filial piety back to Trump. And that's true of everybody in this Trump 2.0 cabinet. In Trump 1.0, he thought he needed guardrails. It was his choice. He once told me that he went to Studio 54 and with the velvet roach there and the stanchions, he saw an old man sitting on the Curb. And this. I should have put this in the book. And he said he saw that man. He said, can I help you? In a surprising moment of compassion and empathy that Donald Trump had as he tells it. And the guy looked up and he said, don, Donald, how's Fred? It's Bill. Bill Levitt. And he said, bill Levitt, this was the guy who was world's biggest home builder, certainly in the nation. Built these Levittowns all around for returning GIs and everything for the Second World War. And he had sold his company to ITT. Then he bought it back and it all fell apart on him. And Trump walked away shaking his head, saying, you know, he didn't know his limits. He said, that was a cautionary tale to me, to always have people around that would know where the bright line is, because I'll push it right to the line, but if I don't have people around, I'll cross the line. Well, he's crossing the line.

Joanna Coles (18:41)

He said that to you?

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (18:42)

He said that to me.

Joanna Coles (18:43)

Fascinating, because in Trump one, obviously, he did have that.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (18:46)

He said that to me in public. As a matter of fact, he said that in Malaysia. So if anybody can get that recording, it was in Kuala Lumpur. He just felt he could let his hair down because you're so far from home, right? But yeah.

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Joanna Coles (19:26)

But he. But you said four. I thought it was six of his businesses went into bankruptcy.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (19:33)

Well, it's. It's four that I'm aware of. You are there six? Yes.

Stephen Tian (19:37)

And of course, as you know, it's a long track record of Trump adjacent businesses, too. There's. Through all of his branding deals, he's branded everything from Trump vodka to Trump steaks to Trump watches to Trump bibles to Trump wines to Trump mortgages. He can't keep track of all the branding deals. He loves the branding deals because that's the core structure of a Trump deal. He keeps all the upside to himself. He offloads the downside to someone else. It's how he approaches business. It's how he approaches life.

Joanna Coles (20:02)

It's how he approaches every negotiation world, unfortunately. Right. With. Well, so just talk about him using the law in the way he does, and we'll come on to the war. And I want to ask you about that, but you have some really specific examples in the book, which I would love you to talk about in terms of how he uses the law as a bludgeon to go after people. And there's an excellent example of one of his properties in Doral in Florida, where he uses Benjamin Moore painting. It's the wrong paint for the wrong job. The paint starts flaking, and he then launches a campaign against the paint company and against the guy who did the painting. Can you just talk to that story?

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (20:51)

I'm relenting on that.

Stephen Tian (20:52)

One of the great things about this book is we had the opportunity to talk to literally dozens and dozens of Trump insiders, and this was a fascinating tale that was told to us by his former fixer. Maybe you can guess who it is. After Trump himself ordered the cheapest paint possible, even though everyone around him said, you can't use use this paint, of course he says, I'm gonna order this paint anyways. And then he gets the paint, and the paint starts peeling off the walls. And instead of taking responsibility because that's not what Trump does, he of course blames the paint and says, this is junk. I demand a refund. And he sends his fixer to go after Benjamin Moorer. And how he does it is very illustrative of how Trump does things. The fixer threatens that. You know, we're gonna just file a lawsuit against you. And every lawsuit we file gets a lot of attention because Donald Trump is Donald Trump. Do you really want us to go in front of the cameras and say, benjamin more such of junk quality that it can't even stick to the walls. And of course, Benjamin Moore is like, where did this come from? We'll do anything. Please, Mr. Trump, just leave us alone. We'll do anything. And of course, they give him truckloads of free paint buckets that he didn't really need. And he's laughing about the whole thing when it's reflective of how Trump sees the world.

Joanna Coles (21:58)

But why do people buy it? We know that this is a consistent business practice of his. Why do people fall over? Why didn't Benjamin Moore say, this is ridiculous. You're on your own? And. And for example, it's been an interesting experience watching Michael Wolff, my co host on Inside Trump's Head, not Take the threats that Melania Trump was going to sue him for $1 billion and turning around saying, well, actually I'm going to sue you. And now they're in an interesting lawsuit. Because he's like, no, no, I'm not falling for this. I know what your game is and I'm a writer and I can make great content out of this, but you're not taking me down. I don't understand why more people don't stand up to him. I don't understand why didn't.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (22:47)

Michael Wolff is a good example.

Joanna Coles (22:48)

Primaries.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (22:49)

He's had the courage to do that. And of course Bob Woodward and several others. Not as many as though you would think. And you'd say, well, how about the whole Republican primary in 2015, 2016, as he mowed them down individually. I went to Larry Kudlow's house and perhaps this probably shouldn't have been the book. I don't know if this is in there.

Joanna Coles (23:08)

Well, I feel like we're getting lots of extras.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (23:10)

Yeah, I know we didn't write into

Stephen Tian (23:12)

the book, but we trust 450,000 that

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (23:15)

were close to him.

Joanna Coles (23:15)

Call me and I'll tell you this is, this needs to go in.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (23:18)

Larry had a, you know, as you

Joanna Coles (23:20)

want to explain who Larry Cuddler is,

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (23:21)

he was, he became the, the chairman of the Trump's chief economic advisor. And he at the time was not a Trump supporter.

Joanna Coles (23:30)

And this was Trump.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (23:30)

What this is, this is as he was running for Trump 1.0. And the group had about 60 people in a salon style dinner at Larry's house in Redding, Connecticut with somewhat too dramatically right of center people. I think he always would have me there for entertainment reasons. I don't know why, but they're very deep pocketed people. They went around the room as to who their candidates were, whether or not it was Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz or Carly Farina or whomever. And then they got to me as the last person, of course, as the most lowliest of stature there. I just said, I think you folks are missing the elephant in the room, which I thought would be a flattering mascot to a Republican audience and not an insult. And I said, it's the guy who has 30%. Nobody in this room has. And they all chortled and they said, and one person stood up and they were laughing and I was sitting next to Roger Stone. I said, well, Roger, you have to agree, as Trump's former campaign manager until today, did you quit or were you fired? He said, I quit. He said, well, then you would know, and he said, I couldn't support Trump only because what he said about Megyn Kelly, the then Fox News host with blood coming out everywhere, I said, oh, so you care about misogyny? I didn't really think Roger Stone was that kind of person. I'm impressed. He said, no, I don't care about the woman thing. He said, I can't be a Republican consultant and have my candidate attacking the party. Oh, okay. So as they went around the room, one woman stood up. A tall, thin woman. She said, jeff, you know, if you weren't a schoolteacher, you would know what I know as an expert on the psychographic behavior of women Republican voters. I said, what is that? And this was Kellyanne Conway. She said, let me tell you, I can tell you with authority that not even 2% of Republican women will ever support Donald Trump for president, which is why I'm vice chairman of the Ted Cruz campaign.

Joanna Coles (25:07)

Kellyanne Conway said that.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (25:08)

Kellyanne Conway said that she went to work, she wanted to become a senior advisor. And then sitting at the next table was Mary Kissel, who is the one of four members of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board. And she said, well, it's gotta be Carly Farina. She's three times as smart as Trump, that Trump's an idiot. She wound up becoming a senior person in the Justice Department with Trump. Or was it Treasury? But she. Yeah, Trish. So, you know, these people, they. They flip pretty quickly, and it's. It's amazing that they. They fall in line. They're afraid. You look at CEOs, he's taken on just this year, the CEOs of Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, the CEO Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, the Doug McMillan, CEO of Walmart, the David Solomon

Joanna Coles (25:50)

Morgan is fighting back. So he's gone after J.P. morgan for debanking him after January 6th. Right. When I'm sure they couldn't get anybody to support taking him on, whatever the banking regulations are. I'm sure they.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (26:04)

Well, the four bankruptcies didn't. Didn't help either. So, in addition, of course, but.

Joanna Coles (26:08)

But the January 6th moment was when they debanked him. He's now suing them, but they're fighting back.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (26:15)

They're. They are. And yet sequentially, he's taken them on as well as Walmart, as well as Harley Davidson. The CEO of Harley Davidson, Matt Leviticus, was selling bikes 100% made in the US into the EU until, because of reciprocal trade barriers that they put up in response to Trump's tariffs, we couldn't get U S made bikes into the eu. He had to shut down a factory in Kansas City and opened one in Thailand so the Thai bikes could go into the EU. But 100% of American bikes were made in America that were sold here. Trump said he took that as a personal offense. He said to his MAGA following, which is heavily tied in with MAGA with writers. And meanwhile his employees lean somewhat anti MAGA. The CEO's not political, just trying to pilot the company down the center of the road, while Trump tells them don't buy Harleys. The stock plummeted and the CEO got fired. What they have failed to learn, which the Business Roundtable has failed to learn. Even Jamie Dimon, who once chaired the business roundtable, Doug McMillan, who as the head of Walmart chaired the Business Roundtable, they aren't standing by them. It's like Benjamin Franklin said, although I shouldn't quote that to you, to not be offensive here, given the heritage issues, is that if we don't hang together, we shall surely hang separately. Is that the CEOs periodically. At one point in 2020, we pulled together because they wanted me to. 93 CEOs we called 100 of them overnight. When Trump declared himself the Victor in the 2020 elections in November, we pulled them together on 12 hours notice. And 93 of them came out with a very strong statement of corroborating condemnation. Right, Condemnation. You have evidence, show it. We don't see it. Here's who won. Congratulations. And that became the script that Bibi Netanyahu and xi Jinping and Bush 41 used. And it certified the truth because that's a critical role of business leaders. And when Tocqueville came to this country and wrote Democracy in America in 1840, he said it takes leaders, business leaders and leaders, pillars of the community, to certify the truth. Because our laws, to the surprise of many, were intentionally written to be loose because we'd have people speak out for what. What the truth is to certify it. So they did on that occasion, but they've missed it recently. And this is the trouble we have seen sequentially, business leaders and until quite recently, the clergy have been too cowardly. Trade union leaders have been too cowardly.

Joanna Coles (28:32)

Well, you saw the Pope speak out on Palm Sunday saying enough with this language around praying for people to go and kill other people. Clearly directly at Pete Hexus, directly Pete

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (28:43)

Hess, which is a major affront. We haven't seen the evangelicals take a counter position just yet. They're concerned because of Course, in this country, I think the Catholic vote is about 22%. It's pretty significant.

Stephen Tian (28:54)

And, Joanna, this is exactly why we wrote the book. Because in order to counter Trump, you have to understand how Trump operates and what his methods are. Regardless of what you think about the guy, you can't say we're normalizing him, because we're not. But in order to actually understand what he does, that is the crucial predicate in order to be able to counter him, because he uses certain methods. For example, as Jeff said, divide and conquer. He will try to pit the CEO of Walmart against Target, GM against Ford, Boeing against Lockheed Martin, nafta, Mexico against Canada, France against Germany. This is how he sees the world. It's chapter three, divide and conquer. And you have to understand, if you are seeking to resist Trump's divide and conquer tactics, as Franklin said, surely you must hang together or you will hang separately. You have to stay together.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (29:40)

The EU or the people with Greenland. We just saw that a month and a half ago. It was remarkable. Even though they had failed on earlier occasions, somehow. Here's Tomer. In the eu, the UK and Canada, they rose up together and barked back at him. And what does he do? He melts when that happens.

Joanna Coles (29:56)

He chickened out.

Stephen Tian (29:57)

He chickened out. But that's another lesson, and that's why we wrote the book. Take his negotiating style. He opens with a punch to the face.

Joanna Coles (30:04)

Well, let's talk about his negotiation style. I absolutely love that. I mean, you. You reference the Zelensky interview, where he goes immediately after Zelensky. You talk a lot about how he opens with his most aggressive offer and then frequently backtracks from it. But talk a bit more about that

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (30:23)

most times, and not most times, anytime. Anybody you'd interview here from either sector, government service or private sector or independent sector, from nonprofits or any political party, or even former Boy Scouts like myself, they'll tell you that, like, building a fire is how you build trust. You get little sticks and tinder and kindling and maybe some branches, and you start building in more and more until it catches before you put in a big, thick, heavy green log. Trump takes that big, thick, heavy green log, smacks you in the nose with it to start, because he thinks after that, everything else is going to look reasonable.

Joanna Coles (30:57)

And why do people fall for it? I mean, I still find it incredible that a businessman with that number of bankruptcies, as you say, he slapped his name on absolutely everything. He can't remember what he slapped his name on. A man who pretended that he was A businessman on television gets to be president of the United States of America, the leader of the free world.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (31:22)

The smoldering embers of the Iranian government seems to still not be falling for that when he keeps threatening them as sequentially that he's going to wipe out the entirety of their electrical generating infrastructure and whatever else. And talking about even extending even further today in terms of wiping out desalination plants just moments ago is they don't take it seriously. They know that he'd be getting widespread condemnation. They know he's not going to get. There's limits that even he would try. So they're not falling for it. I'm not saluting what Iran is doing, but just like the eu, the UK and Canada challenged him and he melted away. He's hit a wall right now. Some of his tricks are not working and he's not quite sure what to do. And the divide and conquer certainly backfired by insulting our allies so much. Not only is NATO, of course, created to be a defensive organization to protect somebody who's been attacked. When the US was the aggressor, they didn't have justification. It's also quite far away from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to have domain. Still, it's hard for them to justify it. Obviously, there's self interest in clearing the Straits of Hormuz for them to get oil and other cargo through for Europe and elsewhere. But still it's backfired on him. But he's made so many enemies. But what's interesting is Jared Kushner has countered this. He's managed to stitch together an alliance, even though Trump hates alliances, because that's how you take down a bully, is through collective action. Right now, the Saudis are perhaps even more aggressive than the Israelis and the US in taking on Iran and the Emiratis too, that they are actually going to join forces and perhaps some others. I actually worked with Jared in support of the earliest days of the Abraham Accords. Is that. That was remarkable. It did support Trump's unorthodox style. I'm giving Jared the credit for it because, again, Trump doesn't like to stitch it together. Alliances in Jared for what people will say about him getting a percentage of every deal and everything else. And that's fine. He does have an ability to be a very quiet, effective backstage negotiator.

Joanna Coles (33:25)

This was Jared's suggestion that you write this book. In fact, what you've written, I think.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (33:30)

I don't know that he's going to protect me from an IRS general compliance audit, but Yes.

Joanna Coles (33:34)

I was going to say, I think what you've done is written a blueprint for Democratic candidates to take Donald Trump's methodology seriously and counter it. So if you're exactly.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (33:45)

Are we allowed to hug you on the set? That's exactly. Nobody has gotten. That's exactly what it is. Instead of calling names, trying to figure out what he does to learn how to counter it.

Joanna Coles (33:53)

Right. So what would you recommend people do? You are a student of people's leadership style. We've established that an enormous part of what Donald Trump does is create noise and drama and grab the attention. But actually it's possible to push back against him, either with an alliance or just by taking a. Just by saying no. You see what happens when he goes after people and they don't engage or they just say no, and there are people he doesn't go after. So if you're reading. If I'm reading this book and I'm a Democratic presidential candidate for 2028, what should I be looking at? Where is Trump weakest?

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (34:34)

If you were to counter Trump, depending what your objective is, there are different lessons from this book. If you're. Gavin Newsom as Governor Newsom from California is completely different than Governor Ned Lamont from Connecticut. Governor Ned Lamont is not running for president. Governor Ned Lamont wants to try to figure out how to reverse some ridiculous denial of funding of already granted wind energy projects and various other things. And we are a very large defense contractor. He doesn't want to kick the guy in the face. Gavin Newsom doesn't have that objective. He'll kick him in the face. So chapter 10 in here, which has to do with the grandiosity and drawing on the Ozymandia Shelley poem and everything else about how some statues in the stand, I think sand just fade away with time. They don't have the impact they think they do. If there's anything Trump hates losing more than money, it's pride. So that's what Gavin Newsom goes after. Ned Lamont knows exactly. Stay away from that. Let me try other ways. So he'll build coalitions. That shows you something of something of value. Trump will go so far to embrace Mayor Mandami because he says Mandali, he sees that he's got a following, a constituency. So Governor Lamont will show that I've got. He's got something of value. He has knowledge. He has a very reliable ecostruxure for the defense industry. So whether or not it's Pratt and Whitney, whether or not it's Lockheed, the submarine Building that we do there. There's a lot of this happening in Connecticut that Trump needs. So he'll take a look at how can he do things that Trump needs, and then Trump will reverse position instead of. Instead of insulting him. Gavin Newsom. It's a different approach. So the Democrats who want to take him down should learn that. They also should learn the divide and conquer that Trump desperately tries. You know, he's trying to play out Bernie Sanders versus Chuck Schumer, whatever it is. He's gonna try to create wedges and flatter people from time to time. To our shock and amazement. It shouldn't be to our shock and amazement. We saw just two weeks ago. He flattered, you know, of all things, Elizabeth Warren, Senator Warren driving in his car, she's so giggly and excited. The President of States called her, who she was just tearing to shreds seconds earlier. Oh, he chose her to talk about interest rate ceilings. And they could form an alliance on all this. And so he can do that and create fissures. They should watch that. He doesn't do this. He's very good.

Joanna Coles (36:48)

So he may well end up splitting or pitting Democratic candidates against each other.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (36:54)

This is what he's going to try to do.

Joanna Coles (36:55)

Right?

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (36:56)

And they should not let that happen. It's just another lesson.

Stephen Tian (36:58)

But this book also extends far beyond the Democratic candidates running for president. If you're a grassroots Democratic activist, this book is for you, too. Because in order to counter Trump, you have to understand how he operates. He will set traps, and you have to be careful not to fall into those traps. I'll give you one quick example. Chapter six, we have the Wall of Sound, Trump's perpetual noise machine of perpetual distractions. Take all the affordability issues, all the domestic issues, where poll after poll shows Trump is consistently polling underwater. And Epstein. What does Trump do to divert the narrative away from affordability, away from Epstein, away from domestic challenges? First he goes and he snags Maduro out of Venezuela. Then he creates an entirely invented issue over Greenland, pitting her NATO allies against each other. Then, of course, he goes to war in the Mid east with the Iran

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (37:49)

conflict even going so far as the horribly racist caricatures of the Obamas and monkey outfits is intentional. That wasn't an accident. It also wasn't as impulsive as people thought. Just because it came on a late night Truth social post. It was an intentional device he had. He's the only person we'll ever know of that actually will shoot themself in one foot and hurt themselves to take the attention off the other foot is he. Because he knows he'll create something else tomorrow, even negative. Almost anybody we know would try to substitute positive imagery with negative imagery with positive imagery. He doesn't care. He substitute positive negative with even more negative if he wants to get you off of something. And I told the producers of most of the Sunday news shows that I know on a Friday afternoon. I did this two weeks ago. I did it last week. Everything you think you have scripted, my daughter works for one of them. You have scripted. You think you're going to do on Sunday. It's not going to happen. They said no. No. Because he wounds up kicking the ball down the field and everything on Epstein to affordability, to whatever else they thought they were going to talk about. It went right out the window. Ice. That went right out the window. They wound up talking about whatever nonsense he created as an intentional diversion. Venezuela is a perfect case in point. He didn't have an explanation why he went in there. What was the imminent threat? He initially said it was Russian and Chinese warships. Well, that disappeared quickly. That wasn't the case. Then he said it was drug interdiction. And right away people brought up, well, how about the president of Honduras, right.

Joanna Coles (39:10)

Who he just pardoned.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (39:11)

He just pardoned a guy who actually was transporting drugs into the U.S. we didn't see much in the way of illicit drugs from Venezuela coming in. We have problems with Mexico and mainly China with illicit drugs coming in here.

Joanna Coles (39:23)

Juan Hernandez had been sentenced for 45 years.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (39:27)

He was extradited, he was indicted. And then he had a jury convicted him of multiple charges. And then the judge sentenced him for 45 years. And then Trump, just one month earlier, and that was. The drug charges went out. That wasn't it. So then he said it was at the behest of the US oil industry. I personally called several of the. And this is also not in the book. It just is in the book. As a matter of fact, on the tip of what happening is he called the heads of the drug. He didn't. He never contacted the oil industry. I did. And they said that was false. We have no interest in reifying the ugly American imagery of the 1950s and 60s where you had, you know, Chiquita and Dull their predecessor companies, or he

Joanna Coles (40:07)

called them all together and had that

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (40:08)

meeting and they defied him.

Joanna Coles (40:10)

And they looked. They looked bored. One of them said, venezuela is uninvestable.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (40:15)

The CEO of Exxon. Exactly. They had no interest in that. They didn't want that corroded infrastructure that thick, heavy, sour crude, as it's called, is for asphalt and lubricants. You can't convert it into gasoline anyway, so this is nonsense. It was all it was. It was just a distraction. Just a distraction.

Joanna Coles (40:30)

A distraction.

Stephen Tian (40:31)

So just to bring the distraction point to closure, what is the lesson for Democrats? There is. You have to stay focused on your own message. Trump will constantly try to put you on the defensive, shifting from diversion to diversion. You cannot fall for it. You cannot try to keep up with all the diversions he creates. You have to stay relentlessly focused on. On what you want to focus on, not what Trump wants.

Joanna Coles (40:52)

Right. So you cannot let him set the agenda. All right, so I came across a quote in your book. I've written down so many quotes. I found it such an interesting book. And I was on. Sometimes I was arguing with you, other times I was agreeing with you, but there was one here that I thought was super interesting. Donald Trump's career path is not that of a conventional politician, businessman, or media titan, nor that of scholar, historian, psychologist, global diplomat, military leader, or economist. Yet he disrupted each of these fields, revealing enormous gaps in what the experts presume to be the realities of their respective domains. His leadership instincts frequently match this research of decades of scholarship and academic theory, which he never needed to read to deftly intuit and deploy. Now, we know he doesn't read very much. We know he doesn't like experts. We know he talks when people come in the room. If you talk to anybody who's tried to show him a PowerPoint, he closes them down. So just tell us, what sort of intelligence does he have? Because you're right, he's ferreted out gaps that he's able to exploit. Why are you laughing? Was this your line? Was this your paragraph?

Stephen Tian (42:07)

This was Jeff's favorite line from the introduction. That's why I'm laughing, because Jeff's favorite.

Joanna Coles (42:12)

Very good observations.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (42:13)

He doesn't believe in experts. He's a very good listener, though. When I went in with.

Joanna Coles (42:17)

He's a very good listener.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (42:18)

I went in with this guy, Jacob Hacker. I shouldn't have named a political scientist from Yale. He was grilling us about gerrymandering, and Jacob walked out thinking, gosh, I didn't think he was interested in reforming. He said, I assure you, he's not interested in reforming it. He didn't know what it was. But you could laugh at him not knowing what it was. But he now knows what it is and how to manipulate it, and that's what he listens for. He listens very carefully.

Joanna Coles (42:44)

Does he listen because he can't read? I mean, there's a lot of discussion about whether or not he's dyslexic or he just can't read. He's illiterate. We know that he got sent to military school because he was performing so badly at school. No one's seen his college transcripts. And there are never any books around in the White House when he's there. And of course, he mocks Joe Biden all the time for the autograph pen. So I'm fascinated. And you say he's a good listener, which is often a sign of someone who's dyslexic.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (43:12)

We don't know if he's dyslexic. He's been making fun of dyslexia recently, as we know, by taking on Gavin Newson calling it a cognitive defect or calling it a weak mind or whatever it is. But we don't know. We don't know what his grades were at Penn. And I don't know why he doesn't read, but I'm glad he doesn't because he'll look at this book jacket, which is mildly flattering, and hopefully he'll like it, and fall for the. And miss the George Eliot admonition about not judging a book by its cover is maybe he'll like the COVID and we'll be saved. But if he reads it, it's something different, is that he doesn't believe in experts. For example, with the Abraham Accords, we had legions of Democrat, Republican, Bush, Obama and earlier era Mideast experts, as well as experts from around the world. To their credit, they had some 30 different nations represented there, a lot of Europe, all saying that what he wanted to do was wrong. But he listened and he saw, you know, the World bank invested here, the IMF there, and Trump heard, I didn't know this, that what they were trying to do with greenhouses didn't connect to desalination plants. Well, I didn't know. So it was hodgepodge and that the power plants didn't connect to the desalination plants that they had there. And so things that they didn't have a workable system. So they came up with a comprehensive plan. And it was actually, which is we had Princess Rima with us, the ambassador to Saudi Arabia, to the United States. It was just so frustrating that at the, toward the end of the Biden administration, we were, they were about 8 to 10 days right away from actually signing the final stage of the Abraham Accords. That would have brought the Saudis and others in is that they had a fantastic plan that was comprehensive. So this. And again, I'm not endorsing Trump. I am sort of endorsing Jared. And what they had there is that with Morocco, UAE and other countries signing on board there, it was quite promising. It was an alliance that was going to work. But that somehow Trump saw that there was a missing piece that none of the experts understood. The experts were just too fragmented. He doesn't see it that way. The way he kept pushing the United States Constitution without being a constitutional law expert. How much we learned about the weaknesses of our own government that we didn't have the checks and balances that we thought there by him constantly pushing, well, how about this? Well, how about that?

Joanna Coles (45:33)

Why can't I do this? Why can't I do that?

Stephen Tian (45:35)

And Trump uses very intentional methods to undermine expert authority. I'll give you two of his favorite tactics. Number one, he loves to invert hierarchies of power. He put ptac Seth, who topped off as a lieutenant, as the secretary of defense in his first term. I think Mark Esper topped off as a lieutenant colonel as well. They're the lowest ranked military to ever serve as Secretary of Defense. Dan Kane, his current Joint Chiefs of

Joanna Coles (45:58)

Staff charity, third star general, not a four star general in charge of a

Stephen Tian (46:01)

bunch of four star generals. The lowest ranking general to ever hold that position. He loves putting the subordinates in charge of the bosses to invert the hierarchies of authority so that he's not boxed in, so that Trump calls all the shots. Another favorite tactic. Look at how many jobs Marco Rubio has right now. He's Secretary of State, his national security advisor, he's national archivist. He's running usaid. I mean, he's basically running Venezuela, he's running Cuba.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (46:26)

Fluidity of those roles so that they have back to chapter one. They have that filial piety. They're beholden back to him and it backfires on him. When they don't have the legitimate authority as the courts would rule, whether or not they're agency heads or cabinet heads or U.S. attorneys, they wind up not being able to execute what they wanted to do because they don't have the deficient authority. But there's another really critical lesson that ties into the next round of elections. We have to watch out for that this country falls victim to regularly. And that is something which we've called the sleeper effect. It's not our term. It was actually a term that was created back at Yale, Yale School of Mass communications in the 1950s, was studying what Goebbels and others did in the 30s. And this is not an overblown alarmist parallel. It's the truth. It was the big lie, as Goebbels called it in the Third Reich is what they do is they take something and if you tell a sophisticated audience both sides of the story and implant three or four flaws in there. So our friends think, oh, I've heard both sides. Let's say our friends are sophisticated. Let's presume they heard both sides. But they're driven. Only it's like a street magician here with shell games on the street. The trick has already been done and the setup in advance. So they're driven to one side. And you tell those who don't care about the details of it all, they don't have the time or the interest one side of the story. And regardless of one side or two sides, you keep pounding away at repeating and repeating and repeating so that the source of news guard may come along, Steve Brill may come along and Gordon Krovitz and say, well, that's not true, or the Poynter Institute or some other fact check at the Washington Post or whomever, it doesn't matter. They discredit that challenge. And the message. Research shows the message lingers if they keep repeating it. And almost a sociopathic way people think, well, they're so sure of themselves. So that you can get 22% of the country to believe that Haitian refugees are eating their neighbor's pets, even though the Republican governor, mayor and police chief of, you know, Springfield, Ohio, are saying it's not true. Or you get people to believe, even though 64 courts, including those who are dominated by Trump judges. That and his own top election officials saying the elections were honest in 2020 and that all of he'll get people convinced that only the top of the ticket, all the down ballots were just the top of the ticket was somehow manipulated. It's ludicrous. But to get people to believe it. And that's the problem.

Joanna Coles (48:46)

All right, so final question. Do you think, and this is to both of you, do you think Donald Trump knows what he's going to do next in the bombing raids on Iran, this war in Iran? Do you think that he knows what's next?

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (49:02)

I, you know, we think that he is trying to do something right now to tamp down expectations. Ironically, the alliance with the Saudis and the Emiratis is backfiring on him a little bit because they're talking about how they're going to help fortify a military campaign. And as we see thousands and thousands of soldiers coming over there, it's pretty clear he's going to at least go for the enhanced uranium at a minimum. If not, the Straits of Hormuz or another barrier island is going to have a critical role. He definitely has some sort of a ground invasion in mind, but he's trying to. Don't look over there, look over here. And that was not working for him.

Joanna Coles (49:42)

Do you think he's going to end up then like the fellow he saw on the street, who. Mr. Levitt, Bill Levitt, who overreached? Is this Donald Trump's overreach?

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (49:55)

He's meandering that way. If he winds up with a lot of our soldiers in harm's way, as it's looking at the vulnerability to have all these people on ships, for example, just sitting there as targets, we have some catastrophe. It's going to be way over his head.

Stephen Tian (50:09)

For Trump, it's all about power. That's what it comes down to. And in this case, he's created such a massive, overwhelming buildup of the US Military and the Mideast. It's such a disproportionate balance of forces that, you know, he's tempted to use those forces no matter what he says. He's a master in the art of deception. Don't read his truth social posts too literally because a lot of that is just smoke and noise. But because he cares so much about power and because he's created the environment for such an overwhelming projection of force in the Mideast, there's a good chance that he'll want to use that power.

Joanna Coles (50:45)

Well, I think Jared Krishna, the son in law, is going to regret suggesting that you write this book. And I think the Democrats, anybody running organizers, community leaders, any candidate is going to pick this book up and see it as the blueprint on how to defeat Donald Trump, which is to humiliate him and is to fight back and not to take his bullying seriously. Anyway, I say that as someone who's been called a lying sack of shit by Donald Trump.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (51:13)

So which is a badge of honor? Badge of honor.

Joanna Coles (51:16)

I'm taking it as a badge.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (51:17)

Number six on Putin's list of enemies of the Russian Federation. These are badges of honor.

Joanna Coles (51:20)

Excellent. Badges of honor. We share our badges of honor. Well, thank you, Stephen Tian and Jeffrey Sonnenfeld for coming into the studio. And I hope they get more books back in stock. You know, when I was reading this book, I really sort of was arguing with it as I read because I didn't want Trump to get some of the credit for the things that he does. But you've heard Geoffrey and Stephen argue about why he does deserve, and I agree with him on this, to be taken seriously. He is, after all, the president. He's creating all sorts of havoc around the world. We know some of the reasons he does it because he wants attention, because he's desperately trying to distract from the terrible things that are going on on here in America. But you make your own mind up. And when you do, let us know what you think about the book, but also let us know what you think about this conversation. You know, I love reading the comments. I share them with our guests and we get lots of ideas and advice from you. And as David Rothkoff said on Monday, it's a community. It's a community of people who care about America, who care about democracy and who want to keep it. So thank you if you have been for joining us. Don't forget, subscribe to the podcast. As I said at the top, we're independent media. So the good news is we have so many bee beast tier members now there are too many names to read out. And we really appreciate your support. Thanks to our production team, Devon Rogerino, Ryan Murray, Rachel Passer, Heather Passaro, Neil Rosenhaus.