Trump's trillion-dollar TACO that wasn't: Iran confronts the master of the deal with a partner he can't bully
On Monday morning, it looked like President Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed “Master of the Deal,” had done it again.
After roiling oil markets over the weekend with an ultimatum on Iran, he declared victory before the opening bell, posting about 15 points of agreement and pausing his threat to bomb the country’s power plants. Nearly $2 trillion was moved within minutes as Wall Street clamored to do what it has learned to do with this president: put some TACO dip on its proverbial chip.
TACO—Trump Always Chickens Out—became the defining trade of last year’s tariff wars after the shock dip on “Liberation Day” last April. The term was coined by FT journalist Robert Armstrong to describe the pattern Trump exhibited: Escalate, terrify, then reverse course and claim victory. When traders realized that Trump, at his heart a businessman, would never let markets dip back to their levels on April 2, 2025, they began to price in the bluster and bought the dip. It worked in 2025 because tariffs are a toggle: flip them on with a Truth Social post, flip them off with another one. Through this strategy, Trump secured diplomatic and economic concessions in Brazil, India, Japan and across Southeast Asia, all while never suffering from severe backlash by traders.
War, however, doesn’t so easily toggle back and forth. TACO has a hidden assumption baked in: that your counterparty wants off the roller coaster as much as you do. Especially with a wounded Iranian regime that has nothing to lose and made its survival synonymous with holding the global economy hostage.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/trump-s-trillion-dollar-taco-that-wasn-t-iran-confronts-the-master-of-the-deal-with-a-partner-he-can-t-bully/ar-AA1Zk8Z8