In the first few months of his chaotic Presidency, Trump made incessant and outrageous demands on the world, be they tariffs or Canada and Greenland becoming states of America. Invariably he would back down when the blowback became hard to ignore. This led a journalist at the Financial Times to coin the phrase, TACO – Trump Always Chickens Out.
In June 2025, Trump obliterated, or so he said, Iran’s underground nuclear facilities with bunker busting bombs. The response was a short series of long-range missile attacks on Israel that soon petered out. Apparently, they weren’t obliterated as the Trump administration started ramping up the rhetoric in February with U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff stating that Iran was roughly a week away from producing industrial-grade, weaponizable uranium. Enter the Israelis who had intelligence as to where the Ayatollah would be on 28 February and Trump decided to join in the fun and games with Operation Epic Fail.
This time Iran’s response was not overwhelming but a measured one designed to cause all Trump’s Arab allies in the Middle East maximum pain. The small but carefully directed drones and missiles closed the Straits of Hormuz, shut down all the economic engines of the Middle East: airlines, tourism, export processing zones, refineries, oil and gas exports along with causing expensive damage to USA’s military – an AWACS aircraft worth $1bn, 2 KC-135 air refuelling tankers, 2 large long-range radars in Saudi Arabia worth probably $500m, a F35 Stealth aircraft and a F15E Eagle fighter bomber amongst others. Over and above the losses, the operational costs are running at $1bn per day!
Trump hasn’t got a long attention span at the best of times and the war is now into its 36th day with no end in sight. Assassinating the Ayatollah changed Iran’s response compared to their previous reactions. It is now a radical religious imperative to continue until America is humiliated if not beaten. Having started the war without consulting his allies and having repeatedly dissed them for not joining in, he seems to have lost all interest and is prepared to wash his hands of the whole hot mess that he created all on his own even if America has to go into recession along with the whole world. Never before has he confronted such an obdurate opponent who does not respond to conventional threats and inducements. He has no solution – no one wants to help him out of the hole he dug for America. If he was a participant on his own TV show, The Apprentice, he would have been fired.
Although Trump managed to escape the consequences of the Robert Mueller Report in 2016 on Russian interference in the Presidential elections, he is going to struggle to escape the consequences of the 2026 Mullah Report which reads – FAIL! With luck, the toothless TACO is toast.