This folder contains nine Claude agent skills distilled from Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven
Tian's Trump's Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox (2025),
produced using the distill-to-skill framework (v0.2).
Disclaimer. This is an independent set of operational notes inspired by the book. It is not affiliated with, authorized, or endorsed by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Steven Tian, or their publisher. All credit for the underlying analysis belongs to the authors. These skills are intentionally operational and partial — they are not a substitute for the book's full argument, evidence, and case studies. If this material is useful to you, please buy the book: Trump's Ten Commandments on Amazon.
Each skill is a self-contained folder with runtime-loadable instructions for a Claude agent. The skills are problem-centric, not person-centric — they are named for the user's situation, not for Trump. They generalize to any dominance-seeking leader deploying similar tactics.
Each skill pairs identification (what the tactic is, where it comes from, how to recognize it) with counter-moves (what to do about it). The book's argument is that Trump's tactics are not random chaos but a limited, repeated playbook; these skills make that playbook legible and suggest defenses.
| # | Skill | When it fires |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | dealing-with-a-centralizing-boss |
You're working for, advising, or evaluating an org where one person is the hub, lieutenants are interchangeable, and real authority doesn't live anywhere else |
| 2 | when-a-negotiation-opens-with-a-punch |
Your counterparty's first move is shock-and-awe — maximalist demand, threat, or ambush |
| 3 | spotting-deals-where-youre-the-bag-holder |
A deal is on the table that may be structured so the other side keeps the upside while you inherit the downside |
| 4 | standing-together-against-divide-and-conquer |
Someone is picking off members of your group one at a time, rewarding early defectors, punishing holdouts |
| 5 | fighting-a-lie-that-gets-repeated-into-truth |
A confidently-stated falsehood is gaining ground through sheer repetition |
| 6 | staying-focused-when-they-flood-the-zone |
An opponent is manufacturing a constant stream of outrages and distractions |
| 7 | handling-strategic-insults-and-mockery |
You or your group is being branded, ridiculed, or attacked in calculated personal terms |
| 8 | seeing-through-a-leaders-grandiose-armor |
You're dealing with a leader whose self-presentation feels like overcompensation, and you need to know what kind of criticism actually lands |
| 9 | predicting-who-the-leader-keeps-drops-and-attacks |
You're trying to predict who the leader will retain, rehabilitate, discard, or attack |
| Book chapter | Corresponds to skill(s) |
|---|---|
| Ch. 1: Hub-and-Spokes | #1 |
| Ch. 2: Art of Trump's Deal | #2 |
| Ch. 3: Divide and Conquer | #4 |
| Ch. 4: How Trump Makes Money | #3 |
| Ch. 5: Behind Closed Doors | cross-cutting — material distributed across #1, #5, #7, #9 |
| Ch. 6: Wall of Sound | #6 |
| Ch. 7: Winners and Losers | #9 (primary) + #8 (class-for-the-masses) |
| Ch. 8: Sleeper Effect | #5 |
| Ch. 9: Sultan of Insult | #7 |
| Ch. 10: Donald the Great | #8 |
The book organizes by attacker tactic (the "commandments"); these skills reorganize by defender situation. Ch. 5 (private charm, fluidity of relationships) is mostly context and gets distributed rather than becoming its own skill.
The book has ten chapters, but problem-centric distillation doesn't map one-to-one. Chapter 5 is mostly relational context that strengthens the other skills rather than a standalone problem class. Chapters 7 and 10 are closely linked (winner-sort and grandeur are related mechanisms of the same self-concept) but produce two distinct user-situations (predicting sort decisions vs. reading self-presentation), so they're separate skills.
A single "Trump-leadership skill" would violate three rules of the distill-to-skill framework at once: operator overload (80+ operators), persona-wrapper (name after person), and problem-centric-naming (no single problem class). Multiple narrow skills is the right shape.
<skill-name>/
├── SKILL.md ← runtime artifact loaded by Claude, 1,400–2,000 words
├── OPERATORS.md ← author-time operator index with chapter + academic lineage
└── references/
├── source-notes.md ← full academic lineage (Hovland-Weiss, Fisher-Ury, etc.) + bias caveats
├── rejected-candidates.md ← what was cut and why
└── cases.md ← longer-form cases cited inline, each with "decision effect for a user"
Every operator in every skill follows the same shape:
- Plain English: one sentence describing what it is, no jargon
- Source: book chapter + underlying academic/historical concept
- Detect: observable signals
- Intent behind it: what the attacker is trying to achieve
- Counter-move: what the defender does
- Do not use when: scope boundary
This is not a primary source. The book is Jeffrey Sonnenfeld's interpretation of Donald Trump, not Trump's own writing. Sonnenfeld discloses:
- A 25-year personal relationship with Trump spanning friendship, advisory engagement, and opposition.
- Direct involvement in catalyzing collective CEO responses (2017 post-Charlottesville resignations, 2020 Business Leaders for National Unity).
- A generally adversarial current stance toward Trump's second-term conduct.
The skills abstract the patterns from the specific person to generic dominance-seeking-leader
behavior. Operators are marked is_primary_source: false with noted bias and
time-boundedness caveats. Users should treat cases as illustrations of mechanism rather than
definitive adjudications of specific political disputes.
The academic and historical sources most frequently drawn on:
- Alfred Chandler (Strategy and Structure, 1962) and Larry Greiner ("Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow," 1972) — organizational forms.
- Sonnenfeld's own The Hero's Farewell (1988) — CEO typology, heroic-identity vs. heroic-mission.
- Roger Fisher and William Ury (Getting to Yes, 1981) — principled negotiation, the foil shock-opening style rejects.
- Carl Hovland and Walter Weiss (Public Opinion Quarterly, 1951) — the sleeper effect.
- Herbert Simon (Sciences of the Artificial, 1969) — the attention economy.
- Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (The Imperial Presidency, 1973) — constitutional-constraint erosion.
- Leo Braudy (The Frenzy of Renown, 1986) — fame as insatiable, stage-requires-renewal.
- Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949) — monomyth, messianic framing.
- Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899) — aspirational imitation of success.
- Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels, 1726) — the Lilliputians binding Gulliver, Trump's framing of coalition resistance.
- Kurt Lewin (MIT, 1940s) — field theory, group dynamics under external pressure.
- Herbert Kelman (Harvard, 1970s onward) — interactive problem-solving, enlarging the scope of conflict for constructive resolution.
- Machiavelli (The Prince, 1513) — implicit master-text for power-based retention calculus.
- Clausewitz (On War, 1832) and the Realpolitik tradition — strategic-interest-based alliances.
- Merrill Flood & Melvin Dresher (RAND, 1950) and Robert Axelrod (Evolution of Cooperation, 1984) — prisoner's dilemma formalized and iterated.
Specific non-academic cultural sources cited:
- Phil Spector's Wall of Sound (1960s music production)
- Insult-comedian lineage (Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Andrew Dice Clay, Jackie Mason, Howard Stern, Ted Turner)
- P. T. Barnum — "there's no such thing as bad publicity"
- Roy Cohn (1927–1986) — Trump's early mentor and fixer
- Shelley's Ozymandias (1818) — the cautionary coda
When a user's situation maps to one of these nine triggers, load the corresponding SKILL.md. Each skill ends with a required response structure:
- Judgment — does this skill apply? Which operators are active?
- What Would Change My Mind — what conditions would reverse the diagnosis?
- Next Action — concrete move.
Multiple skills often apply to one situation (e.g., a user working under a centralizing boss who is also grandiose will benefit from #1 and #8 together). The skills are designed to compose.
Produced using the distill-to-skill framework (v0.2).
Primary source: Sonnenfeld, Jeffrey, and Steven Tian. Trump's Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox. 2025.