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The American presidency is an alphabet soup of acronyms. The President of the United States issues an EOP statement. (That’s the Executive Office of the President.) FLOTUS lives in the White House. VPOTUS meets with NSC. The Supreme Court sometimes makes decisions that make the president angry. But Donald Trump’s second term as president has a heretofore unheard acronym in the hallowed halls of the Oval Office: TACO.
The acronym, coined by Financial Times commentator Robert Armstrong last May, stands for “Trump is always timid”. At the time, it described the president’s tendency to impose tariffs on foreign goods but then quickly backtrack as stocks rebounded. As Armstrong said at the time, the key insight of the TACO theory is that “the U.S. government is not very tolerant of market and economic pressures.”
Since then, “TACO” has become a byword for political observers trying to understand a president whose rants belied his tendency to repeatedly cave when his controversial policies touched the hot furnace of reality. Trump has gone wild on tariffs, sometimes imposing and lifting the same import duties within a single weekend. He got into hot water in Greenland after he threatened to annex the island and caused a market downturn, eventually settling on what he called a “concept of a deal” with Europe. He’s done this on immigration, too: The White House, which once aggressively deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota and Maine, is now reportedly telling congressional Republicans to stop talking about “mass deportations.”
Now, Trump may be trying to get rid of Iran via tortillas, too. “The war is very complete, almost complete,” he told CBS News’ Weijia Jiang on Monday, adding that the United States was “way ahead” of the conflict’s timeline by four to five weeks. Jiang’s statement on Twitter at 3:16 pm on Monday reversed the stock market’s slide and pulled oil prices back below $90 a barrel.
On the surface, this sequence of events fits a burrito recipe: Trump’s about-face as the cost of the war mounts, both in money and manpower. Except later that day, the president seemed to come back. “We’ve won on many fronts, but we haven’t won enough,” he told House Republicans gathered for a policy retreat at Doral Golf Club in Florida. “We will go further,” he later confirmed to reporters. By Wednesday, Trump was once again declaring that the war would end “soon” because “there are few goals to aim for” and “we could do worse” and “we’re not done yet.” Can you make tacos?
The TACO theory is somewhat downstream from Trump’s well-documented tendency to verbally brandish various statements the president has crafted in the past, as opposed to his vague “concept of plans” on health care or other language that signals hesitancy (“We’re looking at it very strongly”). But as far as Iran is concerned, the whole exercise is a bit of a red herring. That’s because, arguably, TACO’s secret sauce is that it works best when Trump acts unilaterally and in ways that he can personally defuse by lowering tariffs, recalling immigration agents, or denying threats. Trump almost certainly won’t have that option this time. As TACO founder Armstrong said in his latest column, “Wars don’t end just because someone declares them over.”
The real question, then, is not whether Trump is trying to get rid of Iran over tacos; the question is whether Iran would let him if he tried. It is difficult to assess how the depraved leadership of the Islamic theocracy views the war so far, and even if they believe the war is not going well, they have good reason to show resistance. Iran may welcome burritos. But many foreign policy observers interpreted the election of Mojtaba, son of the late Ali Khamenei, as the country’s new top leader as a sign of resolve. At the same time, a growing number of Iranian drones appear to be finding themselves flagged by the ability of neighboring countries to intercept them. Shipping traffic remains restricted in the Strait of Hormuz, a trade route off Iran’s coast through which a third of the world’s seaborne oil exports pass in a normal year. Iran reportedly began laying mines in the strait on Tuesday, and the Pentagon said it had destroyed Iranian mine-laying ships.
Iran isn’t even the only country with veto power over Trump’s tacos. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is friendly to Trump, reportedly helped convince the president to go to war in the first place. Trump has rebuffed Netanyahu in the past, but this time around, Trump’s own secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the president pulled the trigger in part because he believed an Israeli attack would invite retaliatory strikes on U.S. military bases. So if Trump wants to end the fight quickly but Netanyahu doesn’t — a dynamic that may already be upon us, according to the Wall Street Journal — who wins? There are also Iran’s regional neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Iraq, all of which have their own interests and motivations.
Trump will never suddenly change course. Pressure on him to make concessions could intensify if the war causes natural gas prices to spike further, disrupts supplies of other key commodities, or kills more U.S. soldiers. But even if he did, there’s another element of the TACO theory to consider: As a description of Trump’s behavior, it’s inaccurate a lot of the time. Trump may withdraw temporarily or have his wings clipped by a court ruling. But he tends to be more like the proverbial dog with a bone: unable to let go.
The same is true on tariffs, with Trump imposing new import duties immediately after the Supreme Court ruled last month that many of his previous tariffs were illegal. Despite numerous court rulings to the contrary, the president has continued to reiterate his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged, even sending the FBI to investigate debunked claims of fraud in Georgia and Arizona. He took a break from the war last week, posting multiple times on Truth Social about his feud with comedian Bill Maher. Less than a year ago, of course, he bombed Iran, damaging its nuclear facilities during a 12-day Israeli-Iranian war that killed several senior Iranian officials. Yet here we are. So even if this round of fighting is over, another might be on the horizon.
Instead of TACO, it would be more accurate to say Trump sometimes, temporarily, maybe The chicken is out. But this theory is not very helpful in predicting the next direction of the Iran war. TSTMCO is not a very good acronym either.