The World Is Ready for a TACO

— OPINION —

There is no telling what Donald Trump will say when he addresses the nation on Wednesday night. Maybe the president will proclaim victory and announce that the war in Iran will end next week. Or maybe he will live-nuke Tehran. Maybe the US will leave NATO, or maybe the alliance gave Trump a golden statue or some other award and everything is fine again.

Or maybe he’ll just ramble for 20 minutes as he did in his pre-Christmas address.

What we are saying is that anybody who claims to know what the speech is about is probably lying. After all, the president and senior members of his administration are sending mixed (and often conflicting) messages about the war, its objectives, and its success by the minute.

While it is possible that some details will leak out in the coming hours, we may not know until we see which way the insider trades on oil futures are going to go 10 minutes before Trump goes on the air.

So, if you came here hoping for some insights into what the address will be about, we cannot help you (apart from being able to predict with some certainty that it will all be Joe Biden’s fault).

What we can tell you, however, is what we hope the president will say.

Last year, when he kept announcing tariffs only to then change his mind when the markets tanked, Robert Armstrong coined the term “Trump Always Chickens Out,” or TACO. It accurately described the president’s faux bravado and highlighted the fact that a cratering Dow Jones or soaring gas prices are among the few things that can get him to reverse one of his many bone-headed policies.

Well, now that his particularly foolhardy decision to join Israel in attacking Iran has brought the global economy to the brink of an imminent disaster, we hope that he’ll serve up some TACO tonight.

Primarily, that means that the president can claim victory and declare that all objectives have been achieved.

Sure, Iran will keep its uranium (and be more determined than ever to build a nuclear weapon to prevent another attack in the future), and a more radical version of the old government will use the wealth from selling significantly more expensive oil and charging a toll for ships wanting to traverse the Strait of Hormuz to rearm, but Trump has never let reality get in the way of his preferred narrative.

Maybe he can say that the goal was always to put a younger Khamenei in power, destroy a bunch of missiles, get the price of oil to double to benefit American fossil fuel companies, test the mettle of NATO, or whatever other metric the administration is using these days.

It doesn’t really matter as long as this war stops before things really get out of hand. Because it is quite clear that they could.

Of course, the US military is far superior to Iran’s forces and it could, like Trump said on Wednesday in one of those social media posts that sends completely contradictory messages, bomb the country “into oblivion or, as they say, back to the Stone Ages!!!”

That was never in doubt.

What we have learned over the past month, however, is that Iran has found a formula for effectively fighting back… not against US forces but rather against America’s allies in the region and the global economy.

If you run an authoritarian regime, the high price of oil matters a lot less to you than it does to someone who wants to get reelected and is accountable to angry voters and/or consumers.

For now, Trump still is, and the cost of the war has been enormous to Americans in general and to him and the GOP in particular.

A new poll on Wednesday showed that a mere 31 percent of voters approve of the president’s handling of the economy. Conversely, nearly two-thirds of them think his policies have contributed to the malaise.

These are not sustainable numbers, and, even if the war were to end today, its effects will linger for months.

If it does not, they will likely get much worse.

While we believe that it is important for the Americans who supported Trump to turn on him, and that this would surely happen if the war drags on, the cost in this case is too high.

It’s why we hope that he’ll once again cave, call a loss a win, and give the economy a fighting chance to recover.