{"id":518991,"date":"2026-03-12T11:32:20","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T11:32:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/518991\/"},"modified":"2026-03-12T11:32:20","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T11:32:20","slug":"as-the-iran-war-fallout-widens-trump-seems-to-be-turning-to-an-old-tactic-hes-in-for-a-rude-awakening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/518991\/","title":{"rendered":"As the Iran War Fallout Widens, Trump Seems to Be Turning to an Old Tactic. He\u2019s in for a Rude Awakening."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

The American presidency is an alphabet soup of acronyms. POTUS issues statements from the EOP. (That\u2019s 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\u2019s second presidency has given rise to an abbreviation heretofore unheard in the sanctum of the Oval Office: TACO.<\/p>\n

That acronym, coined by the Financial Times commentator Robert Armstrong last May, stands for \u201cTrump always chickens out.\u201d At the time, it described the presidency\u2019s 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 \u201cthe US administration does not have a very high tolerance for market and economic pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019d on tariffs, sometimes levying and rescinding the same import duties in the course of a single weekend. He\u2019s TACO\u2019d on Greenland after his threats to annex the autonomously governed island caused markets to swoon, ultimately settling for what he described as the \u201cconcept of a deal<\/a>\u201d with Europe. And he\u2019s done it on immigration: Where once the White House was aggressively deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Minnesota and Maine, it\u2019s now reportedly telling congressional Republicans to stop talking about \u201cmass deportations.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Now Trump may be trying to TACO his way out of Iran, too. On Monday, he told CBS News\u2019 Weijia Jiang that \u201cthe war is very complete, pretty much,\u201d adding that the U.S. was \u201cvery far ahead\u201d of the four- or five-week timeline he\u2019d previously floated for the conflict. The statement, which Jiang tweeted at 3:16 p.m.<\/a> on Monday, reversed sliding stocks and brought the price of oil back below $90 a barrel.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cWe\u2019ve already won in many ways, but we haven\u2019t won enough,\u201d he told House Republicans assembled at his golf club in Doral, Florida, for a policy retreat. \u201cWe\u2019re gonna go further,\u201d he later affirmed to reporters. By Wednesday, Trump was back to declaring that the war would end \u201csoon\u201d<\/a> because there\u2019s \u201cpractically nothing left to target\u201d\u2014but also that \u201cwe could do a lot worse<\/a>\u201d and \u201cwe\u2019re not finished yet<\/a>.\u201d Can you TACO a TACO?<\/p>\n

TACO theory is in some ways downstream of Trump\u2019s well-documented tendency to verbally hand-wave the kinds of pronouncements that presidents used to carefully script, not unlike his vague \u201cconcepts of a plan\u201d on health care or other logorrheic tics that signal indecision (\u201cWe\u2019re looking at it very strongly\u201d). But in the case of Iran, the whole exercise is a bit of a red herring. That\u2019s because TACO\u2019s 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\u2019t have that option this time. As TACO progenitor Armstrong put it<\/a> in his latest column, \u201cWars don\u2019t end just because someone declares them to be finished.\u201d<\/p>\n

The real question, then, isn\u2019t whether Trump is trying to TACO his way out of Iran; it\u2019s whether Iran will let him if he tries. It\u2019s difficult to assess how the Islamic theocracy\u2019s degraded leadership thinks the war is going so far, and they have every reason to project defiance even if they think it\u2019s going poorly. Iran might well welcome a TACO. But many foreign-policy watchers have interpreted the election of the late Ali Khamenei\u2019s son Mojtaba<\/a> to be the country\u2019s new supreme leader as a signal of resolve. Meanwhile, a growing share of Iranian drones appears to be finding their mark<\/a> as neighboring countries\u2019 ability to intercept them flags. Shipping traffic remains throttled in the Strait of Hormuz, a trade route off Iran\u2019s coast that fully a third of the world\u2019s seagoing oil exports traverse in a normal year. Tuesday, Iran reportedly began dotting the strait with mines<\/a>, and the Pentagon said it had destroyed Iranian minelaying ships.<\/p>\n

Iran isn\u2019t even the only country with veto power over a Trump TACO. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t\u2014a dynamic that, according to the Wall Street Journal<\/a>, may already be upon us\u2014who wins out? Then there are Iran\u2019s regional neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq, which each have interests and motives of their own.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s one other ingredient of TACO theory to consider: As a descriptor of Trump\u2019s behavior, it isn\u2019t really accurate much of the time. Trump might temporarily withdraw or have his wings clipped by a court ruling. But he\u2019s often more like the proverbial dog with a bone: unable to let it go.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In place of TACO, it would be more accurate to say that Trump sometimes, temporarily, maybe chickens out. But that theory isn\u2019t very helpful in forecasting where the war in Iran might go next. TSTMCO doesn\u2019t make for a very good acronym, either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[5620,28,12,801,156159,2715,234497],"class_list":["post-518991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-benjamin-netanyahu","tag-business","tag-donald-trump","tag-iran","tag-robert-armstrong","tag-taco","tag-weijia-jiang"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}