There is a saying that Trump Always Chickens Out – TACO.
It has nothing to do with the popular American fast-food chain, Taco Bell, but Americans love that nickname for their president when he fails on a threat.
Those who know Donald Trump intimately know he is a bully, and he will blink when challenged.
We have just seen the evidence of TACO, writ large and in blood, in Trump’s war against Iran.
Like all democracies, America’s had never been perfect.
It was Winston Churchill who best captured how imperfect democracy is: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise.
Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
Trump made it to the pinnacle of power through democracy but every day in power is a battle of survival, because the incompetence of the Trump presidency is astounding.
And it has taken the Iran war to lay it bare for the entire world to see.
Even his ardent followers are disillusioned.
In the extraordinary weeks since America and Israel attacked Iran on February 28, the United States and much of the world have been thrown into chaos – in energy, economic and global security, agriculture, aviation and diplomacy.
The International Energy Agency has called the resulting disruption the “greatest global energy and food security challenge in history.”
Brent crude has surged past $100 a barrel. European gas prices have doubled. Fertiliser costs are spiking as the spring planting season arrives, threatening food production all over the world.
As America fights a war of impulse, inflation could hit 4.2 percent this year – a full percentage point above what was forecast just three months ago.
Gasoline prices have jumped 30 percent. Diesel has breached $5 a gallon.
Airlines are cutting flights.
Mortgage rates are climbing.
Investment plans are wobbling.
Wall Street economists are raising the odds of recession.
He is changing the Middle East in ways that his intelligence could not grasp by overriding the CIA’s assessment that killing Khamenei would only produce a harder-line successor – which is exactly what happened, with Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, considered even more anti-American than his father, being named the new Supreme Leader
All because one man entered a war without a strategy or an exit plan.
Trump has always tried to project himself as the smartest person in the room, but all he has done in Iran is fill the world with awe by his staggering ineptitude.
Iran has effectively held the United States hostage at the Strait of Hormuz – the chokepoint through which a fifth of the world’s oil flows – because Trump plunged into this conflict without thinking past his first night on TV as a war president.
He could have seen it coming.
Previous administrations had war-gamed this exact scenario for decades.
Philip Gordon, who served as the White House coordinator for the Middle East under Barack Obama, said it is “surprising that Trump is surprised.”
Every analyst knew Iran would close Hormuz.
They knew the region would erupt.
They knew allies would balk.
Referring to the Obama administration-negotiated Iran nuclear agreement, Gordon explained: “One of the reasons we did the nuclear deal and didn’t try to change the regime is exactly what’s happening.”
Trump withdrew from that nuclear deal in 2018. He ignored the intelligence. He simply didn’t care.
And then came the spectacle of a superpower begging for help.
Trump has been burning America’s goodwill and prestige so recklessly that not even allies in Europe and Asia would respond to his desperate call for warships to reopen the strait.
Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said it plainly: “This is not our war; we have not started it. What does Donald Trump expect from a handful of European frigates in the Strait of Hormuz that the mighty U.S. Navy cannot manage alone?”
France’s Emmanuel Macron declared his country would “never take part in operations to open or free the Strait of Hormuz in the current context.”
Australia, Denmark, Japan, and the United Kingdom offered variations of the same refusal.
How can a leader who has shown no loyalty to friendly nations – who has weaponized tariffs indiscriminately, who tried to grab Greenland from Denmark by coercion, who insulted NATO allies for lives lost in Afghanistan – not understand that he has burned every bridge?
A veteran French defense analyst, François Heisbourg, described the allies’ response to Trump’s pleas as a “global raspberry.”
That is the sound of American prestige deflating.
At the centre of this debacle stands the relationship between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – a dynamic in which the American president has been consistently outmaneuvered.
Netanyahu has spent four decades advocating for regime change in Iran.
It might be considered his life’s work.
And in Trump, he found the one American president willing to say yes – a useful idiot.
Reuters reported that less than 48 hours to the strikes in Iran, Netanyahu called Trump, appealing to his ego, as he made a case for the US President to “make history” by changing the Middle East.
Trump, flush from his costless seizure of Venezuela’s president in January, convinced of his own invincibility, took the bait.
He is changing the Middle East in ways that his intelligence could not grasp by overriding the CIA’s assessment that killing Khamenei would only produce a harder-line successor – which is exactly what happened, with Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, considered even more anti-American than his father, being named the new Supreme Leader.
Trump ignored the absence of congressional authorisation, bipartisan support, or allies buy-in.
He launched “Operation Epic Fury” without any articulation it objectives, and no day-after strategy whatsoever.
The war’s objectives have shifted repeatedly – from backing Iranian protesters, to destroying Iran’s nuclear program, to degrading its missile systems, to reopening the Strait of Hormuz – each goal requiring a different military strategy, none of them achieved.
As I was writing this article, American cable channels were busy talking about how Trump spent four minutes talking about his writing pen, instead of a war in which American lives were being lost and the economy was being crushed.
Trump had shifted a deadline to Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz three times. Iran told him he was only negotiating with himself. Trump is realizing he cannot give orders to some nations like he did in Venezuela. The bully has blinked.
Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute put it brutally: “We have the targeting, but we don’t have a clear goal, and that lies not on the Pentagon planners, but on Donald Trump.” Even the friendly Fox media reported its poll showing 62 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the conflict.
All it takes is one man – one clueless man – to destroy America’s superpower status.
America and most of the world are paying a crushing price for Trump’s failure: through soaring prices, rising inflation, fertiliser shortages threatening the food supply, and the grinding anxiety of a war with no endgame
And for America, that man is Donald Trump.
The damage he is inflicting may outlive him.
Every billion dollars sunk into this misbegotten campaign is a billion not spent on American infrastructure, education or healthcare.
Allies being alienated is a relationship that will take a generation to rebuild, if it can be rebuilt at all.
Trump is the best thing that could have happened to China and Russia.
The two countries not only have an opportunity to bully other nations without being worried, China is attracting investments from US allies and Russia is now able to sell its oil undisrupted.
Trump is, by any reasonable measure, the most clueless, the least prepared, and the worst president America has elected.
Not because he lacks cunning – he has that in abundance – but because he substitutes ego for strategy, bluster for diplomacy, and impulse for planning.
He is the man who told the world he didn’t need allies, then turned around weeks later and demanded they fight his war.
He is the man who promised swift, painless victory, then watched oil prices surge, allies recoil, and American troops come home in caskets.
America and most of the world are paying a crushing price for Trump’s failure: through soaring prices, rising inflation, fertiliser shortages threatening the food supply, and the grinding anxiety of a war with no endgame.
The context in which this damage can be curtailed is not mysterious.
It requires free and fair midterm elections in November – elections in which Democrats must take hold of legislative power and do what the constitution empowers them to do: hold this president accountable, up to and including impeachment, before he finishes the job of dismantling America’s place in the world.
The bully has blinked. It’s time to take him down.
