Published on: October 1, 2026 at 11:17 am
Journalists have had to be nimble during U.S. President Donald Trump’s two terms as he has shifted positions, redirected attention from unwelcome narratives, and made unexpected foreign-policy decisions at unexpected times.
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, offered the above perspective. He coauthored the book Trump’s Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox with Steven Tian, also of Yale.
“I tell friends who work on these Sunday shows putting their storyboard together and their list of panelists and topics together on a Friday afternoon, ‘Don’t worry, Sunday morning he’s going to change what your lead story is, for example, when he changed the narrative by going after Greenland—what in the world?” Sonnenfeld said.
Some people noted that Trump’s renewed threats regarding Greenland in January 2026 coincided with public outcry and media attention surrounding the delayed release of records mandated by the Epstein Files Transparency Act. A series of consequential decisions involving the U.S. military soon followed.
“People were puzzled, annoyed, and angered by Trump’s threat to invade Greenland, and when that fizzled because of Mark Carney in Canada, the EU, and the UK halting him, he pivoted to Venezuela, which he claimed was about drug interdiction,” Sonnenfeld said. “Now there was no and is no significant flow of illicit drugs into the U.S. from Venezuela—there was from Honduras, and in fact, the U.S. properly arrested and extradited the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, and legally brought him to the U.S. where he was indicted by a grand jury, and then went on trial and was convicted by another jury and sentenced to 45 years in prison—but Trump pardoned him, so…
“So much for Trump caring about drug interdiction,” he said. “When that came out, he quickly pivoted and ordered a U.S. military raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and flew him to New York to face federal drug charges and said, ‘Well, it was because of these Russian and Chinese warships in Venezuela’—well, right away that was falsifiable; they’re not there, and that hardly even got any print because it was such a nonsensical explanation, so then he quickly pivoted yet again and said that it was due to the great cache of oil that’s there.”
That explanation was dissected and didn’t seem to add up for many.
“Oil at that time being $64 or $65, not even $70 a barrel, it was below break-even for many companies to extract it because it was so cheap—there’s no incentive to produce more, but, in particular, Venezuelan oil is produced by the second most inefficient, obsolete production company in the world; Russia is the only one that’s worse,” Sonnenfeld said. “It costs Venezuela and Russia $40 to $45 a barrel to extract their oil, whereas it costs the Saudis and the U.S. and Canada half of that—around $22 a barrel—and, furthermore, that oil is a thick, viscous type they call sour crude, so who needs that Venezuelan oil? Nobody wants it.
“Canadian companies produce that same heavy sour crude oil, which is used for lubricants, diesel, and asphalt, and we get it better and more cheaply and reliably and safely from Canada so there’s no reason to do this,” he said. “As soon as Trump justified the raid on Venezuela over its oil, I called the leaders of the oil and gas industry to check with them and said, ‘Look, I have a Fortune magazine article coming out saying that you don’t want that ugly American image of the ’50s and the ’60s when companies were helping to overthrow honestly elected sovereign governments in Central America with unethical, illegal conduct, and are you interested in this kind of oil anyway?’ They said, ‘No, no, no. This is not at our behest.’ I said, “Well, you better tell him so, because that’s what I just said in Fortune. But I have a Time magazine piece … and I’ll quote you, so if you really don’t say anything to him, then your silence will be taken as assent. So, they contacted the Secretary of Energy and the Secretary of State, who the very next day corrected Trump without insulting him somehow.
“It was cleverly done on the news shows, but Trump was still furious at that, so he called the oil and gas industry execs in together for one of those Dear Leader meetings, and as they went around the room, they all said, ‘No, it’s uninvestable—the extraction costs are too high,’ and so he moved on from Venezuela with all of our warships down there, an overabundance of them in the Caribbean, where there’s no reason for them to be. He starts threatening Nicaragua and Brazil and other nations down there for no reason before he shifted focus to Iran.”
