As we reveal in our new book, Trump’s Ten Commandments, published by Worth Books and distributed by Simon & Schuster, you can’t understand Donald Trump unless you understand a fundamental truth about how he sees the world: Virtually everything—everything—is about Donald Trump, and Donald Trump first and foremost. This isn’t a value judgment; it’s just a cold, hard, indisputable fact. In the Trump solar system, he is the sun around which everything else must revolve, and all power resides with Trump and Trump alone. That is the key to understanding Commandment #1: Centralizing All Power In Your Own Hands.
The Intentionality of Chaos–A Vehicle Toward Building Maximum Leverage
Critics looking in hastily from the outside have long diminished Trump by attacking him as chaotic, unpredictable, impulsive, and disorderly. Even if not entirely inaccurate, those labels obscure a hugely underappreciated truth about Trump’s leadership: He can be far more deliberate and strategic than his reactive, temperamental-seeming actions convey. For Trump, that chaos of his own creation can serve as a convenient vehicle through which he creates opportunities to insert himself into the middle of everything, to give himself maximum leverage and cast himself as the primary driver of events.
Despite or perhaps via all the chaos of his own creation, Trump consistently and intentionally has created systems where he centralizes virtually all power in his own hands. It can be something as weighty as global diplomatic negotiations or something as trivial as squabbles between staffers. For Trump, it’s all the same—extensions of “The Trump Show,” with Trump as star, director, producer, and puppeteer.
A Tribal Chieftain Who Centralizes All Power
Another misunderstanding about Trump’s leadership of subordinates is that he is somehow hugely impressionable or manipulable—a “sophisticated parrot” willing to listen to the last person he talks with. In reality, those claims reflect the delusions of self-important cast-offs. Most of the time, Trump is the puppeteer of his staff, not the puppet.
Instead of conventional organizational charts or hierarchical structures with clear, linear chains of command, Trump’s organizations inevitably function as a “hub and spoke” model. In this system, Trump is the central authority; all power derives from him, and all primary subordinates report to him directly. He has knowingly and intentionally created organizational systems where everyone exists to please and serve him.
Pitting Rival Against Rival
Weary of turf wars and empire-building by lieutenants, Trump will intentionally pit rival subordinates against each other. This is not an accident; it is designed to prevent his subordinates from ganging up to box him in. As a result, Trump becomes the sole arbiter of competing interests and factions within his team. Akin to a feudal chief, Trump alone can adjudicate the inevitable disputes between subordinates with overlapping responsibilities and personality clashes, while balancing rivals off one another to constrain colliding agendas. Many share misguided pronouncements that Trump modeled this on Abraham Lincoln’s “team of rivals,” but the reality is simpler and more singular: Trump is the sun around which everything else must revolve.
Teasing the Toolbox
This “Hub-and-Spokes” model is only the first of the stratagems Trump has deployed time and time again. Throughout the rest of “Trump’s Ten Commandments,” we explore the other blunt tools he reverts to repeatedly, regardless of the context. Some of these tools have been startlingly effective and street-savvy, but are prone to blowing up on him in the same, predictable ways. By grasping his Ten Commandments, one can begin to predict rather than merely respond to Trump, regardless of how you feel about him.
“Trump’s Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox” by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian is published by Worth Books and will be released on March 31, 2026. Pre-order your copy now: https://worth.com/trumpten/
