The Method to Trump’s Madness
Corporate CEOs, media pundits, Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle, world leaders across continents, military officers, and neighbors around your town all admit to being equally confused by the volatile rhetoric and violent actions coming out of the White House.
A mountain of literature has attempted to dissect President Donald Trump’s every move. One might wonder what else there is to say about the most polarizing, consequential figure in modern history, especially when, to the casual observer, Trump’s approach can look like pure chaos.
Many insightful observers have made the mistake of writing off Trump as either crazy, chaotic, or irrational.
As a result, even though shelves of books have been written about Trump, neither supporters nor critics have seriously mapped the unique, dangerous, but methodical strategic playbook Trump repeatedly uses to gain, wield, and retain power. Regardless of what one thinks about Trump, this playbook is worth understanding.
Trump’s seemingly erratic behavior can be anchored by a discernible, repeating pattern of certain strategic maneuvers. These are Trump’s own 10 commandments. These are not guidelines for biblically ethical conduct, but rather, Trump’s own distinct set of power principles—a set of street-smart, norm-defying tactics that he deploys with often stunning effectiveness but also occasional backfires in predictable ways.
Trump’s reliance on these core strategies mirrors what philosopher Abraham Kaplan called “The Law of the Instrument”—give a boy a hammer, and everything becomes a nail. Whether the situation calls for a scalpel or a wrench, Trump swings his hammer, or in this case, one of 10 hammers.
To those who argue that the words "Trump" and "strategic leadership" should never go in the same sentence, I say, quite simply, you are mistaken. I hear your arguments and know you will say that Trump is so unpredictable, uninformed, impressionable, and impulsive that clearly he has no strategy. You're not entirely wrong. Sure, Trump is not a strategist in the classic sense of the word. Trump is not the second coming of Niccolo Machiavelli or Sun Tzu. Yet it is a mistake to underestimate Trump's strategic acumen and intentionality.
If Trump is dumb, he is dumb as a fox. While he rarely reads and might not pass some college exams were he to take them today, he has a shrewd instinct for survival, and a chameleon-like adaptability that guides his every move. He is impulsively, even explosively, open with his opinions, but keeps his strategic game plans close to his vest.
Make no mistake about it: There is a method to the madness.
These 10 commandments transcend Trump’s late-life political turn and span his entire life, unifying his singular career spanning sectors as varied as real estate, media, entertainment, and politics.
Commandment 1—Trump's hub-and-spokes model of leadership: Centralizing all power in your own hands
President Trump has been rebuffed by courts disqualifying various interim appointees, ruling they lacked sufficient authority. But this is not the result of the “adhocracy” futurists like Alvin Toffler prophesied years ago. Trump disdains traditional chain-of-command bureaucracy, instead hoarding absolute authority as the Sun around which the solar system must revolve. He intentionally sows division among his top lieutenants, ensuring that no unified coalition can ever rise to check his power.
Commandment 2—The real art of Trump's deal: Maximizing leverage by starting with a punch in the face versus building trust
Trump frightened the world this weekend when he threatened to bomb all of Iran’s power plants unless the Strait of Hormuz was unblocked. But then, as financial markets tumbled, Trump retreated, claiming productive talks were underway. For Trump, negotiation has nothing to do with building mutual trust, but rather is entirely about creating and wielding maximum leverage. He routinely opens bargaining by making outrageously extreme demands, utilizing a "shock and awe" overreach designed to completely disorient his opponents before the actual haggling even begins. Any subsequent ask can only seem reasonable in comparison, or so the thinking goes.
Commandment 3—Divide and conquer: Build walls, not bridges
Rather than seeking unity or forming coalitions, Trump actively works to drive wedges between adversaries, institutions, and foreign countries, shunting them individually from disadvantage to disadvantage with the unerring eye for weakness of an outsider. He uses this tactic intentionally to prevent collective action from forming to resist his own power. That is why he bemoans NATO, NAFTA, the EU, the Business Roundtable, and other collective groups that constrain his own freedom of maneuver. By keeping his opponents disorganized and off balance, Trump believes that he alone can reign supreme.
Commandment 4—How Trump makes money: The art of stealing the deal
The fact that the Trump family benefits from the President’s trade deals and deregulatory moves in cryptocurrency and betting markets should not be a surprise to political experts, but it is. He structures deals to ensure he puts down as little money as possible up front. He ruthlessly offloads as much downside risk as possible to others while retaining the maximum upside for himself. This is a pattern of behavior that pervades not only his financial deals but across virtually everything Trump does.
Commandment 5—Trump behind closed doors: The fluidity of friends, foils, and foes
Trump’s warm embrace of New York socialist Mayor Mamdani shocked commentators. But the truth is that Trump views relationships as fundamentally transactional, evaluating people based on their immediate usefulness to him and the constituency they bring him. Because of this, the dividing lines between his allies and enemies are practically nonexistent. This allows Trump to seamlessly rotate people through these categories as their usefulness to him waxes or wanes.
Commandment 6–The wall of sound: Trump's perpetual noise machine of constant, overwhelming distractions
Trump’s headline-generating moves clear the news from failing domestic issues he wants off the national agenda. Whenever damaging narratives threaten to linger, Trump floods the media ecosystem with an overwhelming barrage of self-manufactured controversy and diversionary noise. This deliberate churn of provocations suffocates bad press under a mountain of new headlines, disorienting and exhausting his opponents as they struggle to catch up. Meanwhile, the ricochet effects of Trump being everywhere, on every issue, at all times, amplifies his own power, making him seem more powerful than he is.
Commandment 7—Trump's winners and losers: Avoid losers like the plague and pursue selective retribution
Trump’s worldview is strictly binary: there are winners and losers. Unsurprisingly, he ruthlessly avoids those he perceives as having lost their standing and constituency, while utilizing targeted, selective vengeance to neutralize any perceived threats to his dominance. But ever the astute student of power, Trump would just as rather drown a squeaky wheel in power when confronted with a powerful opponent, and is prone to tossing aside erstwhile allies and supporters when they’ve lost their own standing.
Commandment 8—Rewriting history through the sleeper effect: When relentless repetition becomes truth
No, Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, did not eat their neighbors’ pets. But because Trump persisted in advancing this hoax, roughly 25% of Americans came to believe Trump’s disinformation. By relentlessly repeating his own version of events with absolute certainty, Trump effectively rewrites reality. Through sheer volume and repetition, his assertions are eventually accepted as facts by his followers, regardless of their actual veracity.
Commandment 9—Sultan of insult: Reducing complexity to simplicity
As a master of the insensitive insult, Trump strips complex adversaries down to simple, mocking caricatures, often grounded in some shred of truth, however exaggerated and caricatured. By seizing the offensive, he defines them in the public eye with catchy, memorably devastating labels before they can define themselves, always on offense while keeping adversaries perpetually struggling to catch up on defense.
Commandment 10—Donald the great: The role of grandeur, image, and heroic aura
Trump constantly invents and perpetuates his own heroic myth, casting himself as a singular savior. He utilizes ostentatious spectacle and gold-plated grandeur to project success, providing his followers with an accessible vision of wealth, power, meaning, and belonging. They think they belong to a cause that is bigger than themselves. A cause in which ultimately, everything comes down to Trump, and Trump alone.
Trump’s trajectory has defied every conventional rule of corporate and political strategy. Yet, these 10 commandments have propelled him with stunning success towards both unparalleled highs and lows. Trump is often written off by critics as ignorant and impulsive. This misses the reality that Trump’s histrionics are deliberate moves that sometimes work for him—but often backfire.
Ultimately, Trump’s approach is a paradox: a leader capable of undeniable tactical brilliance, yet hindered by glaring, massive blind spots. Beneath that contradiction lies a discernible pattern of repeated maneuvers. Regardless of how one feels about Trump, understanding the mechanics of how he gains, wields, and keeps power is essential. Before you can properly judge the man, you must first understand the unique way his mind works.
This passage was adapted with permission from Trump’s Ten Commandments (Worth/Simon& Schuster), out March 31st, by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian.