As the Iran War Fallout Widens, Trump Seems to Be Turning to an Old Tactic. He’s in for a Rude Awakening.
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The American presidency is an alphabet soup of acronyms. POTUS issues statements from EOP. (This is the Executive Office of the President.) FLOTUS lives in WH. VPOTUS meets NSC. SCOTUS makes decisions and sometimes angers POTUS. But Donald Trump’s second presidency has resulted in the emergence of a hitherto unheard of acronym in the hallowed sanctuary of the Oval Office: TACO.
Coined last May by Financial Times commentator Robert Armstrong, the acronym stands for “Trump always hesitates.” It described the presidency’s tendency at the time to impose tariffs on foreign goods and quickly withdraw them when the stock market declined. As Armstrong noted at the time, the basic insight of TACO theory was that “the US government does not have a very high tolerance for market and economic pressure.”
Since then, TACO has become a byword among political observers trying to understand a president whose controversial policies repeatedly mask a tendency to cave in when they touch the hot furnace of reality. Trump has imposed tariffs on TACO, sometimes both taxing and canceling the same import duties over the course of a single weekend. He stopped by TACO in Greenland after threats to annex the autonomously governed island caused markets to swoon and finally settled on what he describes as: “deal conceptAnd he’s done it on immigration, too: While the White House once aggressively deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Minnesota and Maine, it is now reportedly telling Republicans in Congress to do so. Stop talking about “mass deportations”.
Now Trump may also be trying to get TACO out of Iran. He told CBS News’ Weijia Jiang on Monday that “the war is largely complete,” adding that the United States is “way ahead” of the four- or five-week timeline it had previously set for the conflict. Jiang’s statement He tweeted at 15:16 On Monday, the decline in stocks reversed, bringing the oil price back below $90 a barrel.
On the surface, the sequence of events fits the description of a TACO: As the costs of war (both monetary and human) mounted, Trump took a turn. But later that day, the president appeared to back down. “We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough,” he told House Republicans gathered at his golf club in Doral, Fla., for a policy retreat. “We will go further,” he later told reporters. On Wednesday, Trump returned to explaining this the war would end “soon” because “there’s almost nothing left to aim for” – but also “we could do so much worse” And “we are not finished yet.” Can you TACO TACO?
The TACO theory is in some ways downstream from Trump’s well-documented tendency to verbally wave away the kinds of statements that presidents carefully script; this is not unlike his vague “plan concepts” for health care or other logoreal tics that signal indecision (“We are looking at this very strongly”). But in the case of Iran, this whole practice is somewhat misleading. That’s because TACO’s secret sauce, so to speak, works best when Trump acts unilaterally and in ways he can personally neutralize by lowering tariffs, recalling immigration agents, or denying a threat. Trump almost certainly doesn’t have that option this time. TACO’s ancestor as Armstrong put it In his last column, “Wars do not end when someone declares that they are over.”
The real question, then, is not whether Trump is trying to find his way out of Iran; If he tries, Iran will decide whether to let him. It is difficult to assess how the corrupt leadership of the Islamic theocracy thinks the war has gone this far, and even if they think the war is going badly, they have every reason to be defiant. Iran may welcome TACO. However, many foreign policy observers commented on the recent elections Ali Khamenei’s son Mujtaba to become the country’s new religious leader as a sign of determination. Meanwhile, the share of Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles is increasing Seems to be finding its tracks Like the ability to capture flags of neighboring countries. Shipping traffic remains restricted in the Strait of Hormuz, a trade route off the coast of Iran through which a third of the world’s seaborne oil exports pass in a normal year. On Tuesday, Iran reportedly started Equipping the strait with minesThe Pentagon also announced that Iran destroyed the minelayer.
Iran isn’t even the only country with the power to veto Trump’s TACO. Israel’s Trump-friendly prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly helped persuade the president to go to war in the first place. Trump has disavowed Netanyahu in the past, but in this case Trump’s own secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the president pulled the trigger in part because he believed Israeli strikes would invite retaliatory strikes on U.S. military bases. So if Trump wants to end the war quickly but Netanyahu doesn’t, the dynamic is this: According to the Wall Street JournalIt may already be upon us – who will win? Additionally, Iran has regional neighbors such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq, each with their own interests and goals.
Never ignore Trump’s sudden change of course. If the war causes gas prices to rise further, disrupts the supply of other essential goods, or leads to the deaths of more U.S. soldiers, the pressure on him to back down could increase. But even so, there’s another element of the TACO theory to consider: As a descriptor of Trump’s behavior, it’s often not entirely accurate. Trump may temporarily withdraw or have his wings clipped by court order. But he’s more like the proverbial bony dog: he can’t let go.
This was also true about tariffs; Trump immediately imposed new import duties after the Supreme Court ruled last month that most of his previous tariffs were illegal. Despite multiple court rulings to the contrary, the president continues to return to his baseless claims that the 2020 election was rigged, even sending the FBI to investigate debunked claims of fraud in Georgia and Arizona. Last week, he took a break from the battle to post multiple times on Truth Social about his ongoing feud with comedian Bill Maher. And of course, it bombed Iran less than a year ago and disrupted Iran’s nuclear facilities during the 12-day Israel-Iran war that resulted in the deaths of many senior Iranian officials. Yet here we are. So even if this conflict ends, another one could be right around the corner.
It would be more accurate to say Trump instead of TACO. sometimes, temporarily, maybe The chickens came out. But this theory is not very helpful in predicting where the war in Iran will go next. TSTMCO is not a very good acronym either.
