Host: US President Donald Trump likes to think of himself as a deal maker, but a lot of people see him a little differently, more like a hostage taker. The common thread here. Using leverage and threats to force people to give him what he wants. So how do you deal with someone like that? The answer might not come from political theory or diplomatic playbooks, but from somewhere else entirely. Hostage negotiation. We talked to a crisis communicator about his experience in high stakes situations, and what it can teach us about dealing with Trump in tense moments. The advice is usually simple stay calm. That's easier said than done, especially online, and especially when you come across rage bait from people like, you guessed it, Donald Trump. In just the past few days, he's gone after us Olympians, music megastars and the Canadian government. We look at why anger is so contagious online and how politicians and others harness its power. This is The Rundown. Donald Trump doesn't hesitate to issue threats and promise harsh consequences to get what he wants. So what actually works when you're dealing with someone like that? We asked an experienced crisis negotiator to weigh in. J. Paul Nadeau is a retired police detective and hostage negotiator, and he joins me in studio. How are you doing, Paul?

J. Paul Nadeau: I'm doing well. Jan, how are you doing?

Jan: I'm doing well. Well, let's let's talk about it. We know that numerous politicians and media have used the term taken hostage in describing their negotiations with Donald Trump. Is that just hyperbole, or is that, would you say, an accurate description?

J. Paul Nadeau: That would be an accurate description. Not only is it just dealing with Trump, the state of the world right now with the uncertainties in democracy and in different policies that are coming out, are making people feel very, very anxious and a hostage to me. When people think about hostages, they think about people in cages, they think about people who have been taken by force. But really, when we take a look at the state of the world, we can still be taken hostage, even though there are no cages around us, because the people in control can make us feel unstable, worried, concerned. So yes, that's a very accurate description of what's happening.

Jan: Have we seen anyone like Donald Trump before? Sort of on the world stage before?

J. Paul Nadeau: Oh, we have. Yes. Throughout history we have seen different people. I'm not going to compare Donald Trump to Hitler, but take a look at what happened back then in Germany with the dictatorships, the the different approaches, the rights that were taken away. But throughout history, we have had leaders who have really put themselves first. And consequently there's been there's been a lot of of anger and a lot of uncertainty in the world.

Jan: All right. In your book, The Hostage Effect, you speak about the re-election of Donald Trump as being sort of the catalyst for for why you decided to write this book. Help me understand that.

J. Paul Nadeau: When Donald Trump was elected, I started to feel like a hostage myself. Like, what's going to happen next? He was talking about taking over Canada, taking over Greenland, all kinds of information was coming out and uncertainty. And I felt, well, what's going to happen next? Every day there was a new announcement and I felt anxious, and someone I know quite well reached out to me and says, are you feeling this, too? And I said, yeah. She says, if there was ever a time for you to talk about how the world is feeling like a hostage, it's now. And I thought about that and I thought, you're right. We are feeling like hostages. We're being taken captive.

Jan: There are obviously a number of stories in your book that you talk about, and I want to get sort of into the headspace of a negotiator. What are some of the early signs that a person is becoming a hostage in their situation, that you write about.

J. Paul Nadeau: When they feel that their voices are being silenced, when they feel that at any time their safety can be jeopardised, their security can be jeopardised, their jobs can be gone. When a person feels that they are immobilised and unable to move forward from the fear of what our leaders will do or say or take away from us. That is a state of hostage. When I talk about the hostage effect, it's almost like a virus. It's a conditioning. You will listen to me and this is what's going to happen. So that's how people are feeling.

Jan: The what sort of mindset is best when preparing to enter a crisis negotiation? We won't talk necessarily as politicians in this case, but as a negotiator yourself. What does that mindset when you're entering into a situation? Or perhaps there is a story that you would like to share.

J. Paul Nadeau: When I'm preparing for a negotiation, I am trying to find out as much as I possibly can about the person I'm about to negotiate with. What intelligence do we have? I'm going from a hostage negotiators standpoint. What do we know about this person? What are the circumstances? What are the barriers in front of it? How am I going to approach? Well, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to seek first to understand and then to be understood, because people want to be heard, they want to be seen, they want to be felt. So when you're negotiating with someone in a conflict or even in a political situation, your approach has to be amicable, has to be open, and has to be someone who's inquiring, what is it that we can do together to work throughout this difficult situation that we're both, you know, what is it that we both want and how can we resolve this? And that's the mindset of a hostage negotiator. I understand you're going through a lot. Hey, Jeyan, I understand. I'm here to help. That's how I would approach you. If you had a hostage. And I would say, tell me what's going on so that I have a better understanding of where I can actually help you to reach what it is that you're trying to reach.

Jan: When we talk, when we when we say hostage, you know, hostages, hostage negotiations, I think we we tend to think of movies and we tend to think of, you know, the negotiator has been called in. There's a phone line, the person is far away. You are now brought in, you know, the sort of the tent or temporary sort of setup. You come in, you grab the phone and you start talking. Help me understand some of the stories. If there was one negotiation that sticks in your mind to this day. What is can you help us understand what that situation was on both ends for the person that you were talking to, but what you were doing?

J. Paul Nadeau: Oh, absolutely. And what you described in the movies.

Jan: Many accurate.

J. Paul Nadeau: Very. Okay. Yeah. For the most part. And that's exactly what it is. We don't want face to face negotiations when there's somebody holding a weapon. Because the danger is quite significant. So the telephone conversation and reaching someone I remember negotiating with a man who was distraught, and he had taken his his estranged wife and his four year old daughter hostage, and he had threatened to harm them before and to take their lives and to take his own. And I just remember getting on the phone with him and establishing that, hey, my name is Paul, I'm the negotiator. I'm here to help. And we then engaged in a conversation where I asked him to tell me what was going on in his mind, like, where are you right now? What's happening? And then focusing on the love he had for his daughter. And and that became a catalyst to find out what mattered to him the most. What matters to you here? And do you want to harm your daughter? Sometimes you have to ask the hard questions. And through that conversation, what I had him do is open up and realise what really was important to him, and then work with him to get him to a state where it took time, but where he understood that in everybody's best interest, it was time to release the child. It was time to release his wife. But first I had to get him to the door, which fortunately. And that was a very, very hard negotiation. It worked. Everybody lived. And that's what we're looking to do.

Jan: Let's return back to Trump in the sense of his personality might be a bit erratic, where maybe some people might not be able to to sense from one day to the next where he's going to be, you know, if you're on his, on his socials, it's, you know, a late night text sort of sends the world into a bit of chaos. But knowing what we know about Donald Trump, what are the most important aspects of his character for a negotiator to keep in mind? As you mentioned, when you go into these negotiations, you get a sense of who they are before. What do we know about him, and what are the ones that stick out to you as something, as someone who would go into a negotiation?

J. Paul Nadeau: He's very focussed on acquiring a number of different things, and and money is one of them. He he says that he has the best interests of the United States in hand, and he's making some, some pretty harsh claims. He's doing some good in many areas, but in other areas it feels like he is really dictating the way things are going to happen. A negotiator has to approach that with an open mind and establish a rapport, because when somebody knows you, likes you and trusts you, they're more willing to work with you. We don't always have to agree with the person that we're discussing or negotiating with, but we certainly have to let them speak and to have them feel like they're being heard and feel like they're being understood. Unless we do that, there is no way of succeeding. And again, it comes down to trust, likeability. And those are the important keys that will get you to say, well, how is it that we can work together to make this work?

Jan: Do you want to clarify that Donald Trump is not literally taking hostages at the moment? We're talking theoretical ones, of course.

J. Paul Nadeau: No, absolutely, absolutely.

Jan: I do want to understand sort of the hostage negotiation principles that you have trained on that you've used. Do they like which ones genuinely transfer to someone like Donald Trump? And then where do the analogies break down, where, you know, this is someone where you're going to have to apply something a little different.

J. Paul Nadeau: The hostage negotiator approaches work in every circumstance. And I teach this in business. And everywhere there is, there is a way of approaching an individual that makes them feel heard. As I said earlier too. And it takes into consideration what they're going through because everybody is going through something different. But unless we have an inquiring mind and ask these, these things of people, we'll never know. So the approach is one of openness, one of willingness to to work. And if there is a conflict willing to work through that conflict, where it falls apart is where people stop communicating or put their hands up and say, listen, I've had enough of this, and you don't see things my way. It's like hostage negotiator. If I if if I had a hostage taker who had four hostages, if I wasn't getting along, wasn't willing to open up and take the time, it takes time. But if I was at that point where I said, listen, John, okay, we're just not getting along, how about you keep two hostages and you give me two hostages? We'll call it a day. You can't do that, right? You have to stay in for the long run and work as as meaningful as you possibly can to keep that negotiation going. Sometimes it's going to be rough. You have to go back and and regroup, rethink re-approach. I don't see that happening.

Jan: I want to what's a little bit different from perhaps some of the negotiations, as you mentioned, with one of your examples, these are done privately on a phone call. There's not a lot of noise. What we're seeing with Donald Trump is, as we mentioned, social media, we're seeing press conferences. When you talk about the word ambush, I think a lot of people think of, you know, Zelensky meeting Donald Trump in the white House and, you know, two leaders across from each other. And that was, again, not a negotiation of any sort. But what how does the negotiation change when the subject is performing for an audience, their supporters on media, for example?

J. Paul Nadeau: It changes because I believe it's a matter of not being understood or throwing yourself out there and saying, look, it's me, look how tough I am. And that's going to happen in certain situations where an individual for the media will strike their chest and say, it's my way or the highway, and sometimes you just can't negotiate with someone who is in that state of mind, not at that time. And then in the background, there has to be other ways and means of trying to reach out and renegotiate and have that openness and that willingness.

Jan: Some might say that this is Donald Trump trying to get leverage in some of these situations. What do you say to that?

J. Paul Nadeau: I say that's true. Yeah, I say that that that's very true in his mind. And I can't go back and tell you exactly where this all originated from. But yes, he does want leverage. And we're seeing that in many instances where certain things are being taken, almost taken away from people. That's why they're feeling like hostages.

Jan: There are many folks who wonder why even bother picking up the phone or even keeping that line active. Why not just hang it up? Why? Why even bother negotiating with Trump?

J. Paul Nadeau: Imagine not. Imagine not standing up and and taking whatever action you possibly can. Rightful action. Imagine just giving up and saying, okay, you got it all. When people don't express their opposition and do it in a peaceful way, then everything will be taken away. Our rights, our voices, our privileges. This is why it's so important to continue to negotiate with someone like Trump, or to continue to do peaceful resistance as to what you see as an injustice, because not doing it makes you that hostage we're talking about. You think you're a hostage now give up on on negotiating with Trump. Give up on speaking about what you feel are injustices within your country. And 1984 is right around the corner.

Jan: Let's talk about our lead negotiator here in this country, Mark Carney. I'm going to play to the movies here. If you found yourself in an elevator with Carney, maybe you've got 30 seconds before he goes. What advice would you give him as he enters another round of negotiations with Donald Trump?

J. Paul Nadeau: Learn how to negotiate. Learn how to learn how to to speak, to listen and to show genuine interest. I would say. You have to take a stance and you have to do it with a certain amount of authority, but you also have to be willing to listen. And again, I go back to what Stephen Covey has said for many, many years. And in his books and his speaks, his talks seek first to understand, then to be understood. Know what you want out of the deal, but also ask the other individual. Be willing to engage and build that trust, not take an offensive. But I haven't seen a negotiation. That's the problem. I haven't seen that.

Jan: Okay, Paul, we are going to have to leave it there. I really appreciate your time. Thank you for your insights on this one.

J. Paul Nadeau: Thank you very much.

Host: These days, anger and aggressiveness online seem to feel louder, sharper and harder to escape than ever. And then there are those who seem set on triggering those strong reactions. So what is rage bait and why is it so effective? Claire Weisner is a graduate of the University of British Columbia Okanagan, who led a study on rage bait as part of her master's thesis. And she joins us from Edmonton. How are you doing?

Claire Weisner: I'm doing well. How about you?

Jan: I am doing great. Let's talk about anger first with this study. I guess the first question is why? Why did you want to look into this?

Claire Weisner: Yeah. So actually in 2020, when Elon Musk took over what's formerly Twitter now X, a lot of people were giving him a really hard time online. And he responded a lot of the time with a laughing, crying emoji. So much so that people started pointing it out. I read an article like a blog article pointing out how much he's been using it in comparison to other emojis. If you look up Elon Musk laughing crying emoji, you'll get like tons and tons of news articles about how he's responded to some sort of controversy with this emoji. And I was just really curious, because that's not what I would immediately think of as an angry response. That's a laughing, crying emoji. Not like GR, right? So I was really curious, how are we expressing, how are we interpreting anger in this new space of online like online spaces in digital landscapes?

Jan: I didn't even know that. And I'm trying to think of the last kind of post that I or comment that I had, and it was exactly a laugh and then a rolling smile. So now I need to rethink that as well. Help us understand, you know, many of us and as a journalist as well, many of us have experienced posting something we think is innocent online or something that's informative and suddenly finding, let's say, unexpected angry reactions help us understand. Do people tend to act or react more angrily online than they would perhaps in real life?

Claire Weisner: So yeah. So anger is a high arousal emotion, which means that it's one of the emotions that we're more incentivised to act upon. So even if you have 100 eyes on your post, 25 people are like, cool, that's that's great. 25 people are like, oh, that bums me out. And then 50 people are like, oh, I'm. Those 50 people are more likely than those other 50 people to comment or engage or share or talk about it. Just because it's that high arousal emotion means that they want to act.

Jan: Now, help us understand the the digital environment itself. What factors in the environment contribute to these angry reactions? I'm assuming when we talk about angry comments, angry reactions, I'm thinking right off the bat all caps kind of screaming and yelling, but we know it's as subtle as something, even in text messages, as putting a period at the end of a sentence. That might just be a generational thing. For some people, it could be the emojis. But what are the factors in the digital environment that allow for this to to kind of fester?

Claire Weisner: Yeah. So one of the main things is actually the platform that it's on. So you already touched on that. So in interpersonal communication, in that texting environment it's more likely to be what we call cold anger, where you're a little bit more invested in controlling your image, coming across as very calm collected and then also like TikTok is more likely to be supportive. That's one of the only places that I actually found. When I expected angry comments, I found a lot of people changing the narrative, actively deciding to be supportive. And then there's anecdotal evidence that says that Instagram is more likely to be angry. You're more likely to get long blog posts based off of the format in Reddit. So it just again, it depends on the environment of the actual platform that you're on, and then also the social norms of that platform. So on Instagram, it's a little bit more common to bully each other, whereas TikTok it's a little bit more common to take that step and actively be choosing to be supportive.

Jan: Can you give us an example of a story that would be kind of viewed differently amongst some of those platforms that you, you had named?

Claire Weisner: Yeah. So I actually did my research on specifically posts that were about the Canadian housing crisis. So one of the things is that just the post itself was going to probably be a different format on Reddit. It was often a link to an article or a synopsis of an article on TikTok. It could be, for example, the one with the support that was just an interview on the street, and they were like, oh, do you own a house? And this young woman said, yes, I own a house. But then there's also people just talking about their opinions and stuff like that. So a little bit more. Not as formal as Reddit, where they're like, okay, like these are the facts. Like these are the news articles that we're going to be talking about, you know, try and keep it grounded, whereas TikTok is a little bit more, you know, loosey goosey. We're just talking about our opinions, how we feel.

Jan: All right. Aside from how people reply to posts, some outlets appear to do this intentionally. Some accounts where what is known as rage baiting, which was, from what I understand, Oxford Dictionaries 2025 word of the year. Why not joy baiting or sad? What is it about rage baiting? I don't know if I just coined a term there, but yeah, what is it about rage baiting? Why is it about anger?

Claire Weisner: Yeah, I would love joy baiting. Yeah. So again, going back to that high arousal emotion, it's just going to make more money. So we're more likely to get those clicks, those shares, those comments, people actually talking about it. We there. The literature suggests that especially compared to Joy specifically, we're much more likely to engage in that active way with anger than we are with joy. So it's just at the end of the day, it's the bottom line. What's making us the most money, especially like in an era of like influencers, where what the money that you make depends quite literally on how much engagement you're getting on your post. It can be very effective to upset people and get them to engage with you on that level.

Jan: Can you give an example? I'm thinking of joy baiting. I'm thinking of cats, I love cats, I have a cat at home thinking of these cute videos and then rage baiting. What? Give me some examples of what people might be used to seeing when it's when when we consider something as rage baiting.

Claire Weisner: Yeah, a lot of the rage bait that I encountered was about immigration, because, again, that Canadian housing crisis. And so just broad statements that aren't necessarily grounded in reality about immigration and politics, just really, really broad statements that can kind of make anyone angry. It doesn't necessarily matter where you land on the political spectrum just because it's, you know, not necessarily grounded in fact, but it is a very, very emotional subject and it often is a little bit offensive.

Jan: Well, let's talk about let's use immigration as an example. You know, something that, as you said, kind of grew online. But we did see protests, you know, on both sides of the coin on that conversation across the country, are we increasingly exposed to hot anger online? And what impact does that have? Sort of in our real world? I think a lot of us think that it is kind of protected, sort of on the, on the.com. But there is are we seeing spill-over?

Claire Weisner: Yeah. So we like you said, we're a little bit we feel a little bit protected. It's called like a social isolation idea where we can't see the other person on the screen. So they kind of stop being real. And the consequences are we don't think of them. So whereas in person, I might be less likely to scream and yell at someone who disagrees with me. I'm more likely to do that online just because the consequences of how they perceive me, of my, you know, social standing is aren't in peril from this engagement. I do think that we are a little bit seeing spill-over, but there is still those social mores that inhibit us from behaving poorly in person in a way that we don't see in online spaces. So a lot of people will like, talk about like in these online spaces. I, I thought that this was really normal. And then I came out of it and it like and I talked to real people and you know, it's a lot more nuanced than maybe I'd initially thought.

Jan: With that being said, are we becoming an angrier society?

Claire Weisner: I couldn't say that's definitely a little bit out of the scope of my research, but definitely we are becoming more comfortable with being aggressive with each other in online spaces specifically.

Jan: All right. My last question to you is, you know, for someone for a lot of people who are on their phones probably watching this segment on their phones as well, what advice would you give to ordinary folks who are feeling the weight of online anger on a daily basis? What can we do?

Claire Weisner: Yeah, definitely. Number one, step back. Try and remember that the person on the other end is also a person. That's something that I always have to remind myself that they're not necessarily doing this with the intention of hurting me. They just aren't thinking about me as a person. They're thinking about me as this, you know, empty canvas of internet. And also just remember who's profiting off of what you are, what makes you angry. So if you see something and it really, really upsets you, who makes money off of that? And if it's if you can identify that, then maybe it's not worth engaging with.

Jan: All right, Claire, really appreciate your insights. Thank you so much. And yeah, let's maybe we'll watch. My phone's been listening, so I'll get lots of cat videos I'm hoping outside of this. So appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Claire Weisner: Thank you so much. Have a good day.

Host: I'm Jeyan thanks for watching The Rundown. We'd love to know what you think. So send us your suggestions and feedback at TVO.org/rundownfeedback or leave us a comment on YouTube. See you next week!