Published on: September 28, 2026 at 1:39 pm
The American comedian Stephen Colbert famously coined the term “truthiness”—something that seems true because it feels right, regardless of facts or evidence—in the first episode of his satirical show The Colbert Report in 2005. U.S. President Donald Trump is a master of using truthiness to his advantage.
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, Trump often invents narratives riddled with false information and labels media reports that contradict his narratives as “fake news”—and his MAGA base accepts his verifiably untrue claims. Sonnenfeld has coauthored the book Trump’s Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox with Steven Tian, also of Yale.
During the September 10, 2024, presidential debate, Trump targeted the immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio; his opponent, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, looked on in disbelief as he falsely said, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating … they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
That fabrication traced back to an unfounded rumor that originated from a Facebook post. News outlets such as Reuters and BBC Verify and independent fact-checking organizations, including PolitiFact, debunked Trump’s false claims about Haitian immigrants. Springfield, Ohio, city officials and local police confirmed that there was no evidence of pets being harmed or eaten by Haitian immigrants or anyone else.
“He invents facts; he changes history,” Sonnenfeld said. “The clip of the presidential debate, in which Trump kept insisting that Haitians are illegal refugees when most of them are legal residents in Ohio and were recruited to work there, and that they’re eating their neighbors’ pets, was as alarming as it was almost entertaining, but more frightening.”
He said, “When the Republican governor of Ohio, Tom DeWine, says, ‘No, that’s not true,’ and the mayor of Springfield, Ohio, was asked if that happened, and he says it’s not true, and the mayor is a Republican, by the way—the police chief there says it’s not true—it’s not true. But still, 18% of the people in the country still believe it because he said it.”
Sonnenfeld highlights that “there’s a phenomenon that’s called the sleeper effect, when an assertion from a low-credibility source becomes more persuasive over time as people remember the message but forget its unreliable origin, and research on it illustrates how you keep repeating false information, you tell different types of people from various groups different information, you approach them differently, and then you just keep repeating the lie and the message takes hold.”
