Published on: October 2, 2026 at 9:44 am
U.S. President Donald Trump has shrugged off mistakes and bounced back from a list of scandals in part by manipulating the media and controlling the narratives about himself and his presidency.
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 will do seemingly self-destructive things but usually has a method to his madness—or at least is successful in changing the subject. Sonnenfeld, along with Steven Tian, also of Yale, has authored the book Trump’s Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox.
“Friends of ours in the media and at many voting-rights organizations are absolutely right to be harshly critical of Trump, but where they get it wrong is to presume that these are all as impulsive as they seem, because often they do seem to be emotionally charged,” Sonnenfeld said. “He has a stocked shelf of these things that he uses to change the subject, these go-to ways to spark outrage and other strong reactions—these are deliberate choices.
“How could that be, especially with his poll numbers falling to record lows? Right now we see he’s looking for scapegoats,” he said. “He’s trying to deny the reality of the war in Iran, high inflation, and poor poll numbers, so he’s trying to use that sleeper effect, saying the numbers aren’t what the numbers are, as he did with the false story about Haitian immigrants eating pets. He does the same with elections, claiming that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and insisting that every down-ballot Republican candidate was just fine, but some bamboo fibers on ballots prove that fraudulent ballots had been secretly flown into Arizona from Asia to tip the election in favor of Biden.
“I mean, that’s ludicrous; there’s no basis in fact, but he’ll keep saying it.”
Trump’s repeated mentions of baseless conspiracy theories have led many to speculate whether he deploys falsehoods tactically or whether he actually believes them himself.
“I’m not classifying him as a sociopath—I’m not a psychiatrist, and I have never examined him,” Sonnenfeld said. “But psychiatrists will tell you that somebody who has sociopathic tendencies is so rigid and convinced of their righteous position that the therapist is the one who’s more changed by the interaction with the patient. The patient is so self-confident that they start to breed a little bit of self-doubt in the mental-health professional: ‘Maybe I don’t have this quite right. Maybe there’s something about him I don’t understand,’” he said.
“Trump is the only person who will find these different distractions—it’s the new shiny object, and it’s always just another one of these elements that generates press coverage and gets people talking about something else.”
As per Sonnenfeld, Trump is a master of spinning narratives to control the public conversation.
“If things aren’t going well for him with the Epstein Files material, and there are three million pages, and then the ones that are released are heavily redacted with names of victims released and names of predators protected, but then there are another three million files that are not released at all,” Sonnenfeld said. “What’s going on there?
“And as people are hunting that down and trying to get to the bottom of it, he mentions a conspiracy theory, or sends out a racist meme on Truth Social,” he said. “Or when a reporter asks him about the affordability issues in the context of tariffs and inflation, or healthcare, or the Iran quagmire, or other fronts, what does he do?
“He comes up with a distraction and changes the subject.”
