Trump Told Me All His Shady Business Secrets: Prof

The Daily Beast Podcast

The Daily Beast

News

4.6 • 8.4K Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2026

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Joanna Coles sits down with leadership expert Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and co-author Steven Tian as their book, Trump’s Ten Commandments, dissects Donald Trump not as a politician, but as a pattern—revealing the repeatable tactics behind his rise, survival, and power plays. From a jaw-dropping personal story that begins with a brutal critique of The Apprentice and ends with Trump offering Sonnenfeld the presidency of Trump University, to a breakdown of how he flips enemies into loyalists, weaponizes lawsuits, and thrives on chaos, this conversation pulls back the curtain on the mechanics of influence. The authors map out Trump’s central tenets of leadership—from divide-and-conquer tactics to relentless distraction campaigns—arguing that his real power lies in instinct, not ideology. As tensions escalate globally and questions swirl around strategy, alliances, and control, the episode delivers a blunt, insider blueprint for understanding—and countering—the most unconventional leadership style in modern politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Think you know Sherlock Holmes?
0:02.0	This is the full case file.
0:04.0	All 60 Stories, brought to life by BBC Radio 4
0:09.0	with a cinematic cast and edge of your seat storytelling.
0:12.0	Footprints?
0:14.0	Footprints.
0:15.0	A man's or a woman's?
0:17.0	Mr. Holmes?
0:19.0	They were the footprints of a gigantic hound.
0:23.6	Start listening to Sherlock Holmes, the complete BBC collection on Spotify now.
0:28.6	None of them longer to anybody in the Trump 2.0 presently, is that he saw the branding value in Trump 1.0.
0:36.6	It was to sell more things and put his name on stuff, the grandiosity.
0:42.8	But in Trump 2.0, it's to keep himself out of prison.
0:46.0	And this is what upsets me about people thinking that he's an idiot
0:48.6	because he would fail the geography contest at Yale and Wharton and anywhere else.
0:53.9	Just because there's a lot he doesn't know, and he is ignorant of a lot of things, he is not stupid.
0:58.5	Trump will constantly try to put you on the defensive, shifting from diversion and diversion.
1:02.7	You cannot fall for it. You cannot try to keep up with all the diversions he creates.
1:07.6	You have to stay relentlessly focused on what you want to focus on, not what Trump
1:12.0	wants.
1:14.8	I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast, and we have what I think is a really
1:19.8	provocative discussion for you today with the Associate Dean of Leadership Studies at Yale University. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld has worked with
	...

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