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The American presidency is an alphabet soup of acronyms. POTUS issues statements from the EOP. (That’s the Executive Office of the President.) FLOTUS lives at the WH. VPOTUS meets with the NSC. SCOTUS issues rulings, sometimes making POTUS mad. But Donald Trump’s second presidency has given rise to an abbreviation heretofore unheard in the sanctum of the Oval Office: TACO.
That acronym, coined by the Financial Times commentator Robert Armstrong last May, stands for “Trump always chickens out.” At the time, it described the presidency’s tendency to slap tariffs on foreign goods only to quickly retreat when the stock market recoils. As Armstrong put it then, the key insight of TACO theory is that “the US administration 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 bluster masks a repeated tendency to cave when his controversial policies touch the hot stove of reality. Trump has TACO’d on tariffs, sometimes levying and rescinding the same import duties in the course of a single weekend. He’s TACO’d on Greenland after his threats to annex the autonomously governed island caused markets to swoon, ultimately settling for what he described as the “concept of a deal” with Europe. And he’s done it on immigration: Where once the White House was aggressively deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Minnesota and Maine, it’s now reportedly telling congressional Republicans to stop talking about “mass deportations.”
Now Trump may be trying to TACO his way out of Iran, too. On Monday, he told CBS News’ Weijia Jiang that “the war is very complete, pretty much,” adding that the U.S. was “very far ahead” of the four- or five-week timeline he’d previously floated for the conflict. The statement, which Jiang tweeted at 3:16 p.m. on Monday, reversed sliding stocks and brought the price of oil back below $90 a barrel.
On its face, the sequence of events fits the recipe for a TACO: As the costs (both monetary and human) of the war mounted, Trump pulled an about-face. Except later that day, the president appeared to walk back the walk back. “We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough,” he told House Republicans assembled at his golf club in Doral, Florida, for a policy retreat. “We’re gonna go further,” he later affirmed to reporters. By Wednesday, Trump was back to declaring that the war would end “soon” because there’s “practically nothing left to target”—but also that “we could do a lot worse” and “we’re not finished yet.” Can you TACO a TACO?
TACO theory is in some ways downstream of Trump’s well-documented tendency to verbally hand-wave the kinds of pronouncements that presidents used to carefully script, not unlike his vague “concepts of a plan” on health care or other logorrheic tics that signal indecision (“We’re looking at it very strongly”). But in the case of Iran, the whole exercise is a bit of a red herring. That’s because TACO’s secret sauce, so to speak, is that it works best when Trump acts unilaterally and in ways he can personally defuse by lowering a tariff, recalling immigration agents, or disavowing a threat. Trump almost certainly doesn’t have that option this time. As TACO progenitor Armstrong put it in his latest column, “Wars don’t end just because someone declares them to be finished.”
The real question, then, isn’t whether Trump is trying to TACO his way out of Iran; it’s whether Iran will let him if he tries. It’s difficult to assess how the Islamic theocracy’s degraded leadership thinks the war is going so far, and they have every reason to project defiance even if they think it’s going poorly. Iran might well welcome a TACO. But many foreign-policy watchers have interpreted the election of the late Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba to be the country’s new supreme leader as a signal of resolve. Meanwhile, a growing share of Iranian drones appears to be finding their mark as neighboring countries’ ability to intercept them flags. Shipping traffic remains throttled in the Strait of Hormuz, a trade route off Iran’s coast that fully a third of the world’s seagoing oil exports traverse in a normal year. Tuesday, Iran reportedly began dotting the strait with mines, and the Pentagon said it had destroyed Iranian minelaying ships.
Iran isn’t even the only country with veto power over a Trump TACO. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Trump-friendly prime minister, reportedly helped persuade the president to go to war in the first place. Trump has spurned Netanyahu in the past, but in this case, Trump’s own secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has said the president pulled the trigger in part because he believed Israeli attacks would invite retaliatory strikes on U.S. military bases. So if Trump wants to end the fighting quickly but Netanyahu doesn’t—a dynamic that, according to the Wall Street Journal, may already be upon us—who wins out? Then there are Iran’s regional neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq, which each have interests and motives of their own.
Never put it past Trump to change course abruptly. If the war sends gas prices spiraling even higher, disrupts supplies of other key goods, or kills more U.S. soldiers, the pressure on him to back down may grow. But even if he does, here’s one other ingredient of TACO theory to consider: As a descriptor of Trump’s behavior, it isn’t really accurate much of the time. Trump might temporarily withdraw or have his wings clipped by a court ruling. But he’s often more like the proverbial dog with a bone: unable to let it go.
It’s been true on tariffs, with Trump promptly levying new import duties after the Supreme Court ruled many of his earlier ones unlawful last month. Despite many court rulings to the contrary, the president keeps circling back to his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged, even dispatching the FBI to look into debunked allegations of fraud in Georgia and Arizona. He took a break from the war last week to post multiple times on Truth Social about his running feud with the comedian Bill Maher. And of course he bombed Iran less than a year ago, degrading its nuclear facilities during a 12-day Israel-Iran war that killed several top Iranian officials. Yet here we are. So even if this round of fighting ends, another could be right around the corner.
In place of TACO, it would be more accurate to say that Trump sometimes, temporarily, maybe chickens out. But that theory isn’t very helpful in forecasting where the war in Iran might go next. TSTMCO doesn’t make for a very good acronym, either.
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