Trump Told Me All His Shady Business Secrets: Professor

President Donald Trump loves attempting to undermine expert authority, whether in business or government environments, by inverting hierarchies of power and repeating lies until people believe them, one professor says.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale professor of management and the co-author of Trump’s Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox, told The Daily Beast Podcast that Trump deploys these methods in a very intentional way.

“A three-star general in charge of a bunch of four-star generals‚” Trump’s Ten Commandments co-author Steven Tian told host Joanna Coles. “He’s the lowest-ranking general to ever hold that position. He loves putting the subordinates in charge of the bosses to invert the hierarchies of their authority, so that he’s not boxed in, so that Trump calls all the shots.”

Trump, Tian continued, likes to give his subordinates, like Marco Rubio, multiple jobs so that “they have the filial piety.” Rubio is secretary of state and the acting national security adviser, and previously was also USAID administrator and U.S. archivist.

“They’re beholden back to him,” Sonnenfeld said, “and it backfires on him when they don’t have the legitimate authority, as the courts would rule whether or not they’re agency heads or Cabinet heads or U.S. attorneys. They wind up not being able to execute what they wanted to do, because they don’t have sufficient authority.”

Trump, Sonnenfeld continued, also deploys the same tactic used by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

“It was the ‘big lie,’ as Goebbels called it,” Sonnenfeld said. Accuracy aside, ”you keep pounding away at repeating and repeating" your version of any story, so that the message still lingers.

People may eventually be taken in and believe that the 2020 election was stolen, for example, because those delivering the messages seem “so sure of themselves,” Sonnenfeld explained.

“It’s ludicrous, but they get people to believe it. And that’s the problem.”

The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.

Sonnenfeld also discussed his past interactions with Trump, stemming from a critical review he wrote about The Apprentice.

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Trump responded to it by becoming at first “hostile, threatening, and litigious.” But eventually Trump turned to flattery, inviting him to golf, calling him a “bright young fellow,” and even offering him the job of chancellor of Trump University, the now-defunct business that spurred lawsuits that Trump ultimately settled for $25 million. Sonnenfeld turned the offer down, but the two did become friends, he said.

That was yet another instance of Trump trying to flip perceived enemies into supporters, Sonnenfeld said.

“This is what upsets me about people thinking that he’s an idiot, because he would fail the geography contest at Yale and Wharton and anywhere else. Just because there’s a lot he doesn’t know—and he is ignorant of a lot of things—he is not stupid,“ Sonnenfeld said.

”He has incredible street savvy... and the fact that he could come back continually from the four bankruptcies, from all the 34 criminal convictions... as well as the open ones. And then, on top of that, to come back after having been driven from office as he was, you’ve got to say: this guy is doing something," he said.

“We find that in the arc of his career, nobody’s taking a look at the total pattern over the course of his life,” he went on. “The philosopher Abraham Kaplan used to talk about the law of the instrument: You give a child a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Trump has 10 hammers, and he’s pounding away at them. Sometimes it works for him. Sometimes it backfires.”