Don’t get too comfortable with TACO Trump’s latest climbdown

There’s an acronym that’s been doing the rounds over the last 12 months: TACO. It stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. 

Initially coined by a journalist in May 2025 in reference to market volatility caused by Trump’s hostile tariffs, it’s since entered into more popular parlance – frequently invoked in hopeful, self-soothing tones. There’s something innately reassuring about it.

Anyway, it’s been a good week for TACO fans. 

In my personal favourite, Trump threatened to annihilate Iran, then extended the ceasefire.

He told CNBC on Tuesday morning he had no intention of extending it, and by Tuesday evening he had done exactly that, indefinitely, at the request of Pakistani mediators.

It’s a pattern that is now tediously familiar. Trump blustered, puffed his chest, then backed down and moved on. The shouting is loud and actually laborious at this stage, but the follow-through is limited.

For many, his constant climbdowns are proof that the 47th President has already reached lame duck status. That by virtue of his ever-decreasing capacity for decision making, Trump will be nullified before we know it. 

And yes, the signs are there: the flipflops, the pandering, the concessions. 

After everything – the tariffs, pushing NATO to the brink, Truth Social drops at 3am, Hormuz – the idea that he is fading, that the adults are quietly managing the situation, that we are through the worst of it, that maybe he is even planning for life post-presidency, is enormously comforting.

But I’ve seen what happens when we let that optimism take root too early – it’s naive and it’s dangerous. While a lame duck may have its wings clipped, it might also feel like it’s got nothing to lose by ruffling as many feathers as possible.

I saw first-hand how Donald Trump was underestimated during Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign. A party, and a country, can talk itself into believing the threat has passed. 

We wanted the mood in the room to change. We needed to believe that people could see through him. 

They might have done. But they still chose him.

Look more carefully at what happened this week. Trump didn’t just extend a ceasefire with Iran – he did so in the same Truth Social post in which he threatened to ‘blow up the rest of their country, their leaders included’. 

Ceasefire and annihilation threat. Diplomatic gesture and eliminationist language. In the same breath. With two and a half years still to go.

That doesn’t sound to me like a man who’s going to go gentle into that good night. 

Then there was the report that an American F-15 was shot down over Iran earlier this month. Trump spent hours screaming at aides in the West Wing – and was subsequently removed from the Situation Room during the rescue operation for the downed crew, because his own military advisers feared his temperament would jeopardise the mission.

The President of the United States, behaving in such a way that he needed to be excluded from his own war room by the people who work for him. That is not a man winding down. That is the full range of American military and diplomatic power being operated by someone who appears to have no interest in consistency, consequence or counsel.

And then there is the claim that during the confrontation with Iran, Trump was blocked from accessing nuclear codes by US General Dan Caine.

Of course, our gut reaction to the news of Caine’s alleged intervention is relief. An adult took charge, the system held and the world kept turning.

But the other half of that sentence is that Trump tried in the first place. A sitting president, in the middle of a live military conflict, reached for the nuclear command system – the very final word in war. There’s nothing after that. Nothing.

And the ultimate restraint wasn’t self-imposed. It had to be enforced. Remove that general, or replace him with someone more inclined to sycophancy, and that story might have ended very differently.

The jaw-dropping allegation remains unverified but that hasn’t stopped more than 50 members of Congress backing a bill to remove Trump under the 25th Amendment.

The reality is that a wounded, humiliated Trump is not a safer Trump. It’s a more volatile one – for every climbdown, there is an equal and opposite escalation.

Every concession has to be immediately plastered over with a threat, a boast, a promise of future destruction. 

That is not the behaviour of someone getting ready to cede power. That is the behaviour of someone who cannot tolerate the appearance of weakness for more than the length of a time it takes to smash out another garbled, meandering post.

‘More than two years left and multiple wars in Ukraine and the Middle East still unresolved’ is not exactly a reassuring story. The harder, more frightening truth is that this is far from over. 

In the 456 days since he took office for a second time, Trump’s administration has implemented over half of Project 2025 – that’s the plan he and his team repeatedly dismissed as having nothing to do with him.

Trump has just over 1,000 days left until the end of this term. You can do a hell of a lot of damage in that time. Maybe he does always chicken out in the end. But the real danger is that we do too.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jessica.aureli@metro.co.uk. 

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