Published on: October 1, 2026 at 10:15 am
U.S. President Donald Trump’s behavior is often unpredictable and seemingly irrational, but most of his head-scratching decisions are actually calculated to provide a distraction from events that do not fit his preferred narrative.
According to Academy of Management Scholar Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of the Yale School of Management, who moderated the panel “The Framers of 1776 vs. The Nation’s Leadership In 2026; Is the Vision Now Vivid or Blurred?” at the 2026 AOM Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, this helps explains Trump’s behavior. Sonnenfeld has coauthored the book Trump’s Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox with Steven Tian, also of Yale.
Sonnenfeld noted that Trump is a master of redirecting the conversation when he gets bad news or when something crops up that he does not want to talk about. Trump often references scapegoats and bogeymen such as “the Deep State, immigrants and asylum seekers, the mainstream media, DEI, China, the UN, NATO allies, communists, and, of course, Democrats.”
“Scholars and practitioners alike, as well as people from the left, right, and center, say, ‘Yeah, this is in fact what he does,’ and it has to be understood that there is a method to his madness,” Sonnenfeld said. “So much of what he does and says seems so arbitrary—it seems so stupid.
“He thinks it works, and it backfires sometimes, but it is not arbitrary, and people say he’s dumb—well, he’s as dumb as a fox,” he said. “We had a group of 12 federal judges meet with us recently, and they just were wondering, ‘How does he keep getting away with this?’ Even they didn’t realize that there were these holes in the Constitution that Trump has exploited.
“The Founding Fathers didn’t anticipate the unlimited use of the presidential pardon power, allowing him to enable murderous mobs to be blessed in advance to do whatever they want and not face federal charges or get presidential pardons after the fact, as happened with the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.”
