Published on: September 30, 2026 at 10:33 am
U.S. President Donald Trump is one of the most divisive presidents in history, with his MAGA backers idolizing him and his detractors demonizing him. Some of his divisiveness is intentional, by his own design.
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 has repeatedly deployed divide-and-conquer tactics to gain, regain, and wield power Sonnenfeld has coauthored the book Trump’s Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox with Steven Tian, also of Yale.
“Trump hates unity,” Sonnenfeld said. “There’s an awful lot of people in the Academy of Management (AOM) with scholarship in political science, sociology, and social psychology, doing research about the role of collective action to control a bully.
“Trump instinctively knows this; he didn’t read our literature, but somehow he knows it, and he hates NAFTA and NATO and the EU and the Business Roundtable and an organized Republican Party,” he said. “It’s a divide-and-conquer scheme, and when people have beaten him or gotten him to back down, they’ve learned that lesson about the importance of unity.”
Sonnenfeld cited various examples ranging from President Trump’s attacks on U.S. higher education institutions to his frequent comments on his desire to annex Greenland.
“In April 2025, we managed to get more than 700 colleges and university presidents to organize and come to the defense of the 64 colleges and universities that were under attack by President Trump, and they stopped the assault,” Sonnenfeld said, “When he was saber-rattling over Greenland, saying, ‘There’s a China sphere of influence and there’s a U.S. sphere of influence,’ Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, got the EU and the UK to say, ‘Enough of this—maybe it’s time for a third polarity [alliance] for the rest of us [excluding the U.S.].’
“That was enough to stop Trump in his tracks,” he said. “So, when you have collective action, he pays attention, and then he moves on. Some call him the Roomba president—hit a wall and move on.”
