Published on: September 30, 2026 at 11:17 am
U.S. President Donald Trump doesn’t care whether he’s seen as left, right, or center. Throughout his political career, he’s been able to tap into the pain points of segments of voters and speak to their grievances to gain—and regain—power.
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, while many think of Trump as a right-wing ideologue, he is actually more of a pragmatist who taps into populism, patriotism, and conservatism to serve his own political ends. Sonnenfeld, along with Steven Tian, also of Yale, coauthored the book Trump’s Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox.
“In fact, prior to getting elected in 2016, Trump shared with us that his goal was to go to the left of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and the Democratic Socialists, because he wants to tap into the undercurrent of populism in the country,” Sonnenfeld said. “Some remember that the late 19th-century populist movement in the U.S. was actually quite extreme, just like MAGA is quite extreme.
“Politicians from the left and right all worked together to form the Populist Party in 1891,” he said. The Populist Party ended up endorsing Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 election. “They were one group—the left and the right were unified, but the progressives of the early 20th century were not the same as them—the progressives were always a very centrist party of half Democrats, half Republicans, and a lot of the business community, which was pro-environment, with everyone from Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot supporting the establishment of our National Parks and conservation.
“They were also pro-immigration with Jane Addams and the Hull-House mansion-turned-community center, and they were pro-infrastructure, led by a Republican, Robert ‘Fighting Bob’ LaFollette, a senator from Wisconsin who was the leader advocating for investment in infrastructure, roads, dams, and other things, and his counterpart, Burton K. Wheeler, a Democratic senator out of Montana, was his running mate in 1924, and that’s where much of the business community was politically back in the 1920s, a century-plus ago.”
While Sonnenfeld sees echoes of the Populist Party and the Progressive Era in Trump’s messaging, he says that the current president adopted policies from across the political spectrum to appeal to voters who he convinced to support his MAGA movement. He also noted that Trump behaves more like a showman or salesman than a true believer or ideologue.
“When you go backstage with Trump, it’s like pulling back the curtain in The Wizard of Oz—he looks like he’s playing games with these TV appearances and rallies: ‘Wow, can you believe this stuff? Look, I can sell all these Trump gadgets and apparel and coins and shoes and things, and look at how many people are paying me for this,’ and he thinks it’s a riot, as if he’s not taking it seriously,” Sonnenfeld said. “He’ll just keep pushing, pushing, pushing.
“But he’s not classically a right-wing ideologue—his economic policies, including imposing tariffs, are more Maoist rather than the classical laissez-faire economic philosophy; Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Adam Smith, and Milton Friedman would not recognize their laissez-faire policies in Trump’s executive orders,” he said.
“This administration is highly interventionist, and its centralized control of the government is, again, much more like Chinese communism equated with Chairman Mao Zedong or the state capitalism of modern China.”
