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The soft TACO theory of Trump

Understanding when Trump chickens out — and when he doesn’t.

President Donald Trump’s decision Tuesday to accept a ceasefire in Iran — rather than following through on his threats to escalate the war further with massively destructive attacks harming Iranian civilians — is being greeted with what’s become a familiar refrain: TACO.

Issuing extreme threats has been central to Trump’s governance strategy. But, as many have noticed, he often doesn’t follow through on these threats. This led to the famous acronym TACO, or “Trump Always Chickens Out,” coined by the Financial Times’ Robert Armstrong about Trump’s tariff threats last year.

TACO became a shorthand, especially among investors, to rebut the conventional wisdom among liberals that Trump was an unhinged madman. “It’s an antidote to the wrong-headed view that Trump is a monster of authoritarian ideology,” Armstrong wrote in December, “rather than a gifted reality TV star without any political commitments worthy of the name.”

So TACO is a reading of Trump’s psychology. “I meant it to signify the plain fact that the president has a low tolerance for political or economic pain,” Armstrong wrote. In other words, don’t worry too much about the president’s extreme words or impulses — because a bad market reaction, or a whiff of unpopularity in the base, will spur him to back down quickly.

Viewed through one lens, Trump’s ceasefire in Iran is just the latest in a series of TACO examples. He threatened to end an entire civilization… but, knowing a full-scale war would be massively unpopular and disruptive, he backtracked and resumed negotiations.

And yet — the TACO theory also doesn’t quite fit what happened in Iran. Trump launched a war that lasted over a month, killed many of the country’s leaders and hundreds of civilians, set the Middle East aflame, and did great damage to the global economy. It’s hard to characterize a mere two-week ceasefire as proof that Trump “always chickens out” when he had gone so far already, and done so much harm.

Indeed, it points to a risk of TACO thinking: The theory can become a kind of coping mechanism, lulling........

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