“TACO” Trump Is a Dangerous Mirage

“Trump Always Chickens Out” has been fashioned into a dig at the president over the years. But the gibe is obscuring some difficult truths.

Most of us were duly alarmed on Tuesday morning when the president of the United States threatened to end a civilization by 8 p.m. Eastern time. It seemed entirely possible that if Iran did not “Open the fuckin’ Strait,” as Donald Trump put it, he would drop a tactical nuke on Tehran or do something slightly less apocalyptic but nonetheless genocidal. When a feebleminded lunatic runs the world’s most well-funded war machine, it’s best to worry and risk being accused of overreaction. The problem is that a significant swath of Americans aren’t alarmed enough.

I am speaking of the “Trump Always Chickens Out” maxim that has taken root since the beginning of Trump’s second term. This refers to the persistent belief that Trump is perpetually climbing down from his most dire threats—a paper tiger forever on the verge of folding. TACO theory always gives you the out when it comes to worrying about Trumpian misrule. It also gives Trump’s opponents an easy shorthand for insulting him and making themselves feel better. But it’s worth questioning whether TACO actually has much merit. Off the top of my head, I’m guessing that an untold number of obliterated Iranians may take issue with this contention.

It’s fitting that the TACO meme was largely birthed by Wall Streeters, operating under the shield of plutocratic wealth and chronic naïveté that is intrinsic to the financial services sector. As the Huffington Post reported back in May 2025, the term was cooked up by the Financial Times’ Robert Armstrong to refer to how the markets reacted to “the president’s tendency to announce massive tariffs, causing the markets to plunge, only to back off days later, causing them to rise again.” A certain swath of investors were using TACO theory to do some heavy-duty buckraking. As Ted Jenkin, the president of Exit Stage Left Advisors, told the New York Post, the strategy worked like this: “Once he delivers bad news, investors are buying those stocks when they are beaten down waiting for him to chicken out and watching those stocks rebound in value.”

Over time, TACO morphed from a form of tariff-whispering to a sort of catch-all delusion for markets to pretend that the damage Trump is doing to the economy never really has to be priced in. But it also expanded beyond the concerns of Wall Streeters to become a comforting security blanket anytime Trump either seems to be on the brink of doing something catastrophic or has backed down from escalations.

The Trump administration has actually grown pretty adept at managing and manipulating the TACO theory to its own advantages. Earlier this year, the ouster of Customs and Border Protection commander Greg Bovino, the real-life version of Sean Penn’s character in One Battle After Another, was widely depicted in the press as a sort of chickening out: Trump was forced to retrench in the face of widespread public horror over the administration’s deadly operations in Minneapolis. But under the new management of border czar Tom Homan, the terror machine kept running in the city for several more weeks. Similarly, at the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem’s dismissal in favor of Markwayne Mullin was seen as a setback for the administration, but really it just traded new excesses for old ones. If you were sitting there thinking that the temperature had been lowered or the administration had been chastened, you got played.

It may be comforting to think that in Iran, Trump once again chickened out. After all, a civilization threatened on Tuesday has made it to the end of the week, and there’s a two-week hold on all the proposed war crimes in Trump’s latest atrocity pitch deck. If you’re of the mind that any of this is true, check yourself. Trump has not chickened out; he’s already gone all in: This war of choice has bequeathed a mountain of casualties, tons of destruction, and economic ramifications that will linger for years. What you think looks like a cowardly retreat is actually Trump flailing. He is not in control of the situation, and the danger is far from over.

Also not over: the aforementioned buckraking. Trump’s TACO cycle continues to be fodder for insider trading and market manipulation. Trump’s late-March threat to “obliterate [Iran’s] various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” was followed by a belligerent response from Iran and a hasty Sunday-show appearance from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to head off any market volatility on Monday morning. Trump retreated from his threats in an early morning missive on Monday, citing the phantasmal success of nonexistent diplomatic discussions. But as FT reported, people were getting rich behind the scenes: “Traders made bets worth half a billion dollars in the oil market about 15 minutes before Donald Trump’s post touting ‘productive’ talks with Iran sent the price of crude tumbling and ignited volatility in other assets.”

Once you crack open the shell of this TACO, what you’ll find isn’t a source of reassurance or a fun gibe to toss in Trump’s direction. It’s all the same misrule, criminality, and corruption. Paul Krugman, who credibly argues that these insider trades are tantamount to treason, bottom-lines it in this way: “You can’t trust a corrupt government to protect national security. And our government is now utterly corrupt: It’s hard to find a single senior official, from the president on down, who treats public office as a grave responsibility rather than an opportunity for personal self-aggrandizement and profit.”

As the events of this week prove, life under these arrangements is scary and frustrating. We bear the cost of Trump’s belligerence and suffer psychically as he swings from one unimaginable threat to the next. Meanwhile, insiders get to manipulate the mass media and the markets to further their authoritarian political goals and self-enrichment. This TACO party is proving to be extremely profitable for an elite few, but I’d bet you won’t be invited to it anytime soon.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Sending ICE to the Airports Is Trump’s Dumbest Idea Yet

Weary travelers already mired in the president’s ineptitude are getting a potent and visible reminder of this administration’s authoritarian misrule.

In recent months, we’ve reached the stage of President Donald Trump’s second term where some of his greatest problems are the result of misguided solutions to his previous screwups. We are spending millions on farm bailouts to cover Trump’s devastating tariffs. We’re in a war with Iran to reopen a shipping lane that was open before we started the war. And we are lifting sanctions on the oil that’s floating around at sea on tankers from the country we’re at war with because we need that oil in the market to reduce the cost of gas that spiked because, again, of the war we chose to start.

Essentially, the backlash to the problems Trump first caused forced a response that is destined to lead to more backlash. It’s a comically vicious cycle, but hey, this is kind of what you get when you elect a president who ran on the platform of “If I become president they can’t prosecute me for my many crimes.” But now, everyone who is flying out of a major U.S. airport can have themselves an up-close look at the clattering irony of Trumpian misrule as they stand in epically long security queues to watch recently redeployed ICE agents lumber around, stewing in their own pointlessness.

This decision by Trump, like so many others, really requires one of those “Let me get this straight” paragraphs to truly appreciate the ouroboros of ineptitude on display. So let me bang one out. ICE agents previously deployed to terrorize American cities have engendered such a heavy amount of blowback from the American public that Democrats were able to find the courage to stand firm against further funding of the agency until significant reforms are agreed to in a deal. Trump, who can’t tolerate negotiating with Democrats, has killed off compromises that would permit the funding of the Department of Homeland Security’s other agencies. Because of this department-wide shutdown, the TSA is unfunded, so unpaid workers are dropping like flies and people are having to spend hours in the airport security lines.

The solution to all of this: Send hundreds of ICE agents to these airports to … well, beyond a few reports of agents making cursory and redundant ID checks, it’s not clear what they were meant to do in this situation, and by all accounts they aren’t improving things at all. (Though Lauren Boebert did claim that ICE was making things great again at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport before it was pointed out to her that ICE had not been deployed to that airport.) Because this is ICE we’re talking about, there was mayhem to be had: San Francisco travelers were witness to a particularly horrific arrest this week. But as Defector’s Barry Petchesky reported, the agents are mostly just standing around, diddling on their phones, and begging for a coffee shop manager to hit them with a classic, “If there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean.”

The origin story of the plan to send Immigration and Customs Enforcement thugs to the airport truly is nutty. As CNN reported, this all began when “Linda from Arizona” called in to The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show last week to make her pitch: “I think I have a solution to the TSA problem.” She said, “We need to bring in ICE agents.” Travis took the idea to Fox News to make a direct appeal to the president. Per the report, “CNN searched TV transcript databases and found no other mentions of the idea on major networks until Travis brought it up.” Naturally, Trump ended up insisting that the idea was his. Look, I know this has been a bad week for the AI industry (or as I call it, the “use-up-all-the-energy-to-build-soulless-data-centers-to-steal-the-whole-of-human-endeavor-and-creativity-in-order-to-make-shittier-facsimiles-of-things-people-already-do” industry), but for all the talk of AI slop, here we have some human slop that, against all odds, is substantially worse.

ICE deployments have caused no small amount of harm to the American people. Besides the terror they cause, they are one of the big drivers of the affordability crisis in the United States. Just this week, the Financial Times reported how ICE crackdowns have essentially broken the home-building industry in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. So the decision to make ICE agents—who are a sort of sprawling reminder of how Trumpism isn’t working—more visible to the public is an odd one.

While no one wants to encounter Trump’s brownshirts on the streets of their town, their presence has proven to be oddly galvanizing to the growing dissident movement against Trump. It takes the stupidity and ineptness of authoritarianism and shifts it from a theoretical concern to something local and tangible. It gives people the opportunity to perceive misrule for themselves, and provides a target for their ire. And it keeps people well brined in the salty swirl of everything being politicized.

I personally don’t know if the wreckage of Trump’s own policy stupidity is evident to him. He is, after all, fighting a daily battle with his flagging cognitive abilities. He may perceive the economy as great solely because his many avenues to personal self-enrichment are all paying off. We learned this week that his daily Iran war briefing consists of two-minute montages of stuff blowing up. The barriers between Trump and information awareness, in other words, remain strong. But with his approval ratings tanking, the economy cratering, and the undistilled chaos of his presidency spreading, Republicans might rue the day Trump decided to send a potent reminder to your local airport about how he’s making everything suck.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Trump’s War With Iran Is a Product of His Deep Stupidity

There’s a simple and obvious reason we’re in this mess.

What can be said about Trump’s war with Iran that isn’t already abundantly obvious? The answer: not much. It is not going well, and it probably won’t end well. But having spent time in the salt mines of Trump punditry, I can tell you that we’re going to endure a difficult round of think pieces purporting to explain How This Happened. So maybe this is the best time to assert the obvious, using my favored rubric of Trump analysis: Imagine if the dumbest person in the world and humanity’s biggest asshole were the same person, and that guy was president. Then imagine he started a war with Iran. Now check the news. One look, and here’s what you should be thinking: “Yep, that tracks.”

As with all of Trump’s presidential exploits, success is always constrained by two factors: The aforementioned sharp limitations of his intellectual capabilities and the fact that he is perpetually surrounded by an inner circle made up of clowns somewhere on the spectrum between “rampantly evil” and “thoroughgoing dipshit.”

“Why did President Trump decide to attack Iran?” The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg recently mused. “It depends on what day of the week you ask.” On some days, Trump was acting on (roundly discredited) intel that Iran was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. On others, there is a scent of regime change in the air. Sometimes we are told that we were doing a classic “leading from behind” maneuver, trailing Israel into a conflict it’s long sought. Frankly, I give a lot of credit to the “wag the dog” scenario: With the economy in shambles and Jeffrey Epstein riding high in the headlines, Trump needed a distraction. Also, we mustn’t forget that he’s a warmonger who just thinks it’s fun to blow things up. (For Iran War Stupidity completists, Popular Information’s Judd Legum has rounded up 17 separate and frequently contradictory reasons that the administration has submitted for our approval.)

I’ve been reading the comment sections (of the Financial Times, anyway), and Trump is getting his ass roasted: “Let me get all of this straight in my head. They want their allies to join in an ill-thought-out war of choice with unclear aims and an uncertain chance of success for any of the myriad aims stated so far. They want everyone else to just absorb any of the externalities, like influxes of refugees, disruptions to shipping, higher oil and commodity prices, and maybe even some incoming missiles. And then they also want to tariff everyone at 15 percent.” Brother, you seem confused, but you got it absolutely correct.

Trump is really going through it with the nations that were once, putatively, our allies before Trump launched a trade war with all of them and threatened to seize Greenland in an act of colonial conquest. In the space of days, Trump has gone from begging for European naval support to free the Strait of Hormuz to having those requests punted back in his face to spiraling out on Truth Social about how he didn’t actually need anyone’s help in the first place. Since then, he’s petulantly suggested that he might wreck the whole shop and leave the nations that rebuffed him to clean up the mess. Meanwhile, countries like France and Italy are simply working on side deals with Iran to be allowed to use the strait.

My colleague Heather Souvaine Horn recently expressed to me how maddening it is to see the Trump administration treat Iran’s clampdown of the Strait of Hormuz as if it’s some unfair trick the Iranians pulled and not one of the most singularly obvious strategic choices the regime could make under the circumstances—the other being Iran’s decision to attack other Gulf states, knowing that it would be a pain point for the U.S. both economically and diplomatically. But by Trump’s own admission, the very fact that Iran retaliated in any way has caught him completely flat-footed. “They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East,” he told reporters on Monday. “They hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked!” Right now, there are 13-year-old kids about to invade Kamchatka in their first-ever game of Risk that look like Carl von Clausewitz compared to Trump.

This week, The New Republic’s Alex Shephard wrote that it will be Iran, not Trump, that dictates when and how this conflict ends. At least one anonymous administration official concurs, telling Politico that Iran’s leaders “hold the cards now.” “They decide how long we’re involved—and they decide if we put........

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