Name: Trump is 'shopping messages' on Iran war 'to find out what works’: Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
Uploaded: 2026-03-10T23:02:13.000Z
Duration: 9 min 58 s
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For the last decade, Donald Trump has drastically reshaped the Republican Party and reshaped American politics altogether.

In his upcoming new book, Trump's Ten Commandments, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale University scholar and informal adviser to five U.S.

presidents, outlines the 10 principles that have defined the Trump era of politics.

Jeffrey, thank you so much for being here to talk about the book.

And I want to start first with your relationship to, to the president.

Back when Jeff Zucker was running this, this, this great enterprise, he was running NBC Universal.

He asked if I would write a review each week for the first episode, the first issues, the first season of the Apprentice.

And I would go in the Wall Street Journal.

So I, I, he would get them to me a day in advance and he thought to be positive messages.

But I looked at them, they were unbelievable.

As I referred to it as, you know, the elimination game premise that it was sort of like a musical chairs game at a Hooters restaurant with the sexist overview that it had because the outtakes are pretty scary that nothing that Access Hollywood needed to discover later when you see these things.

so if you can believe it, he's a little sensitive to criticism and he was a little threatening.

After the first, first review, it was labeled Last Emperor Trump and I predicted he would run for president.

And he said, well, to Zucker, NBC and Wall Street Journal tear it up.

And the Wall Street Journal said, no, he sets with traffic out of this.

So I looked at it and said, you know, Mr.

Trump asked if I rescind it and you know, I do.

Last week I said that was the worst possible portrait of business leadership on television I could imagine for young people to follow.

But I hadn't seen this week's and we wound up actually ultimately becoming friends as he got pretty threatening.

We'd go on the Today show, we'd go on to the old Kudlow and Kramer show and your old shows from the old sisters at CNBC and things.

And the he I would wind up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia or in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in battles.

So he called, said, let's get together for golf.

But as we got together on for lunch, he offered me the presidency of Trump University.

But he was trying to replace the squeaky wheel, actually drown it in oil rather than replace me.

And we want them becoming friends because I suggested what became the Celebrity Apprentice.

I said, the trouble is getting these engaging young millennials and putting them in this zero sum, throw them off the island setting.

And he said, well, that's the premise that Jack Welch, who GE owned NBC at the time, wanted us to steal from Survivor, from cbs, and

So he just stole Mark Burnett to produce the same show in a business setting.

I said, well, you know, you got nobody to lead if you're throwing them all off the island if you kill off.

And I said, go for these fallen celebrities.

So he moved it to the Celebrity Apprentice and we became friends after that, although I disagree with him about at least two thirds of the time.

So you have studied Donald Trump the businessman and now Donald Trump the president, in terms of some of his strategies, how he approaches leadership.

And let's talk about one of the tenets that you write about in the book, specifically something called the stage sleeper effect, which you write is when someone states falsehoods with unwavering confidence, people begin to think, maybe there's something I've missed.

This is precisely how the sleeper effect works.

You write, the messenger's confidence becomes more memorable than the message's accuracy.

It was studied at Yale in the 1940s and 50s, based on what was happening in Germany in the 1930s.

The sleeper effect basically says for a sophisticated audience, and

it sounds really class conscious, tell them both sides of the story, but

Just tell them one side and both times just keep pounding away.

And no matter who comes along to correct the source, like you have source corrections out there, are these pointer institutes or fact check places, newsguard or things.

People don't care about that because they.

They see that the mess lingers on the memory curve.

It lingers so you can still keep repeating the message.

You can get maybe 20, 25% of Americans to believe that Haitian refugees are eating their neighbor's pets, even though it's denied by everybody.

Have you seen him employ that when he's discussing the war against Iran.

Actually, what's interesting on that one, he's not sure what message he wants.

Just in the course of the last 48 hours, we happen to have President Herzog and the chief of strategy for the Israeli Defense Forces and the chief of Information officer, as well as Prime Minister Theresa May and others, some U.S.

generals, and they all said, basically, what's the strategy here?

He told us that the nuclear capabilities had been defanged, and

now he's saying he wants to make it inoperable.

But wait a second, I thought where we were eight months ago, ten months ago, and.

And then he's shifted to say that we accomplished about 80% of what we want.

Then he said we've not yet begun the fight.

So it's confusing, but he needs to have a consistent message, and he usually does that.

But right now he's shopping messages to find out what works.

And then once he sees what seems to be working similarly with Venezuela, he went through a whole litany of alternatives.

He suggested, we're going to Venezuela for drug interdiction.

But when it turned out that he had just freed one month earlier of the former president of Honduras, Hernandez, President Hernandez, who hadn't just been extradited, but

indicted by a jury and then convicted by another jury and sentenced for 45 years, and

And that guy actually had proven links to massive drug trafficking into the US Whereas the Venezuela case wasn't so strong, is that didn't hold up.

And he said, well, let me try and say that it's Russian and Chinese ships.

So then he shifted to say, well, the oil industry put me up to it.

And I called the leaders of the oil industry.

They said, no, we have no interest in that sour heavy crude, Venezuelan oil, and