A new theory of Trump: the “soft TACO”

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 people (and perhaps markets) into a complacent denial of the damage Trump can do.

It might be more helpful, then, to look beyond what we might call — with apologies — the “hard TACO” theory, in which Trump always chickens out, and craft a more limited “soft TACO” theory instead.

The “soft TACO” theory of Trump is that, yes, he will often back away from the most extreme threat he’s made, or try eventually to wind down a crisis he caused. But contrary to Armstrong’s assertion that Trump has a “low tolerance for political or economic pain,” his tolerance can sometimes be quite high — even if it isn’t unlimited. And it’s important to pay attention to the very real damage he can do before he decides it’s time to climb down.

The soft TACO in action

Trump’s second term has been chock-full of aggressive action from his administration, pushing the boundaries of presidential power in controversial and disruptive ways. 

But a pattern has developed in which, sometimes, his actions cause a level of blowback — either political or economic — that he concludes is too intense. So he tries to roll things back at least somewhat. Examples include:

1. DOGE: Trump let Elon Musk run rampant through the federal bureaucracy for roughly the first six weeks of this term, firing civil servants and cutting contracts as he saw fit — at one point, he even urged Musk to “GET MORE AGGRESSIVE.” 

But after Musk-induced chaos kept dominating the headlines — and after Trump’s own Cabinet officials pushed back against Musk’s power — Trump leashed DOGE in early March, saying future cuts should be done with Cabinet secretaries’ approval and with “the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’” 

The change stuck and Musk headed for the exits. But other Trump officials, like Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, have continued to try and remake the federal bureaucracy — albeit in less dramatically headline-grabbing ways. 

The scale of the damage will also be difficult for a future president to reverse: Entire agencies were effectively shut down and the federal workforce shrank by 10 percent in Trump’s first year, with nearly 350,000 people fired, quitting, or retiring. And there’s no remedy for people in the world’s poorest countries who already suffered and died waiting for lifesaving aid from programs that were eliminated in Musk’s purge.

2. Liberation Day: Trump stunned the world on April 2, 2025, by announcing “Liberation Day” tariffs on dozens of countries, set at levels that seemed to many to be arbitrary and downright bizarre.

After a week of deepening market turmoil, though, he blinked — announcing a 90-day “pause” on many of those exorbitant tariffs, to allow for negotiations with the targeted countries. This gave rise to the “TACO” concept.

But this wasn’t a complete climbdown. The Budget Lab at Yale calculates that the daily effective tariff rate was 2.3 percent when Trump took office — and it’s at 11.05 percent now. That’s down from the peak of 21 percent after Liberation Day, but it’s still quite a lot higher than pre-Trump levels, and it sat between 14 and 16 percent for much of the last year before the Supreme Court ruled some Trump tariffs illegal. He’s still seeking to institute new tariffs under different legal authority.

3. Minneapolis: Beginning around June 2025, the Trump administration escalated its mass deportation agenda by pursuing highly visible, militarized, and aggressive immigration enforcement in specific cities — provoking and apparently welcoming tense confrontations with protesters in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis.

But in Minneapolis this January, two Americans — Renée Good and Alex Pretti — were shot dead by immigration officials; videos of the killings provoked viral outrage. Pretti’s killing proved a particular flashpoint, particularly when DHS officials falsely portrayed him as an aggressor.

At that point, Trump decided he’d had enough. He removed top DHS officials from their posts (including, eventually, Secretary Kristi Noem). He empowered less hard-line officials to end the enforcement surge in Minneapolis. More broadly, he appears to have abandoned the idea that immigration enforcement should be carried out via street battles in blue cities.

Trump’s climbdown here shows he was not entirely captured by hardline advisers or ideology — and that he did not feel so insulated from political consequences that he could ignore such intense backlash. But it took months — and two deaths — to get him to back down. And he hasn’t backed away from mass deportation; he’s just doing it more quietly.

Trump’s dangerous lesson

Whenever Trump backs down from one crisis of his own making, he provokes another soon afterward.

Minneapolis was barely out of the headlines when Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on February 11 to hear his pitch on attacking Iran. And he’d just pulled another TACO on Greenland only weeks earlier, once again reluctantly backing down only when the markets began taking his threats seriously.

According to a new report by the New York Times’ Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, Tucker Carlson urged Trump not to go through with the Iran attack — but Trump told him “it’s going to be OK,” adding, “because it always is.”

Trump appears to have internalized the lesson that he can act to provoke crises — and always, eventually, rein things in if they get too out of control. That is: that he can do a soft TACO, and it will be okay.

But the Iran war is proving the biggest test of that idea to date, in large part because there’s another player involved this time that can veto a TACO with missiles, drones, and mines if they want, and may have different pain thresholds. That’s a different dynamic than his other self-provoked crises and, regardless of how the war ends, it’s an important demonstration of how one rash, binary decision can spiral out of control despite Trump’s intentions. 

It’s unclear if the ceasefire will even hold — some attacks continued in the region Wednesday morning. It will also be quite challenging to strike a permanent deal with Iran that satisfies Trump’s demands on nuclear material, the Strait of Hormuz, and other issues. And if such a deal remains elusive, might he be tempted to strike again?

Finally, the attacks and retaliation from Iran have done a great deal of damage to the global economy that will be felt for months or years. Trump’s soft TACO may be able to reverse some of that — but it can’t fix everything that’s been broken.