When we mentioned yesterday that Trump was blaming Iran for firing the Tomahawk missile that destroyed an Iranian girl’s school on February 28, we suggested he’d probably (or hopefully) have been briefed otherwise and was merely lying. Now we’re not so sure. Asked at his presser yesterday why he was the only member of own administration accusing Iran of the strike, Trump replied: “Because I just don’t know enough about it.” Truest thing he’s ever said.

Bill and Andrew will be live again today at 10 a.m. ED

Happy Tuesday.

It’s TACO Time

by William Kristol

To TACO or not to TACO, that is Donald Trump’s question.

I think we know how it’s likely to be resolved.

TACO, for those sane humans who haven’t been obsessively following all the commentary on our 47th president, is an acronym for Trump Always Chickens Out. The term originated on Wall Street last May, after Trump would threaten or even announce tariffs and then reverse himself after a negative market reaction. A TACO trade involved buying stocks after a tariff announcement pushed them lower, then selling them after the tariffs had been postponed or reduced and the market had rallied. In general, the Street has found betting on the TACO trade to be profitable.

Yesterday we saw the mother of all TACO trades. Oil prices were soaring and the market was falling. Then at 3:30 p.m., President Trump told Weijia Jiang of CBS that the war could be over soon: “I think the war is very complete, pretty much.” Oil prices promptly plunged and stocks shot up. You could have made a lot of money in that last half hour of trading. For all we know, some Trump insiders did.

But chickening out isn’t a matter of one phone call. It takes time and can be a bit complicated to pull off. And of course Trump won’t acknowledge he’s doing it.

So in his speech later that afternoon to House Republicans, Trump dutifully read the hawkish passages that had been written for him: “We have won in many ways, but not enough. We go forward more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory that will end this long-running danger once and for all.”

In his more off-the cuff remarks, though, and in his answers to questions at the press conference that followed, Trump’s inclination to TACO was dominant: The war was a “short-term excursion,” its progress “was ahead of schedule,” and it could be over “very soon.”

Now Trump will continue to unleash violence and destruction for a while. And he’ll continue to threaten, as he did last night on Truth Social: “If Iran does anything that stops the flow of Oil within the Strait of Hormuz, they will be hit by the United States of America TWENTY TIMES HARDER than they have been hit thus far. Additionally, we will take out easily destroyable targets that will make it virtually impossible for Iran to ever be built back, as a Nation, again—Death, Fire, and Fury will reign [sic] upon them.” But this protesting-too-much bluster was followed by the TACO tipoff sentence: “But I hope, and pray, that it does not happen!”

I suggested late last week when I took a brief excursion into Trump’s mind that he was already thinking then that “it’s getting to be time to end this, to pull the plug. Because it could all go south.”

Over the last few days the markets started to go south. So did the optics and politics of the war. And so Trump’s now looking to end it.

This process will have plenty of zigs and zags. Pulling a TACO in war isn’t simple. Once you’ve decided to “Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war,” it’s not as easy to get the fierce dogs of war back in the kennel as it is the docile puppies of tariffs.

And it’s not at all easy to contain or manage the real-world consequences of the havoc the war has caused. But worrying about the real-world consequences of his actions is never what’s uppermost in Trump’s mind.

What will be top-of-mind for Trump is the need to look tough, even or especially while chickening out. He’ll want to pull off a face-saving TACO. You might call it a macho TACO.

After all, the macho stuff has been central to the war effort, as Mark Hertling details below. Indeed, it’s central to fascism, including in its Trumpist iteration. As Umberto Eco points out in his great 1995 article “Ur-Fascism,”

Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo . . . Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

So Trump will continue “to play with weapons” and to talk about playing with weapons. That is harmful, and dangerous, and can certainly get out of control. But at least for now the weapons-playing will primarily be in the service of obscuring the fact that he’s chickening out.

Hamlet says near the end of his great soliloquy, “Conscience doth make cowards of us all.” Markets and politics do make a coward of Donald Trump. For Trump’s war, I think it’s TACO time.