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Notes -
I think the idea was
Run up the idea as a trial balloon
If it doesn't float, Trump gets to look like he's reining in Mad Dog Hegseth.
Likely, and additional to that, another TACO instance. (Trump Always Chickens Out.) I’d claim my balls are blue but I lost faith with the Iran debacle.
As I recall, TACO was coined by Wall Street traders who predicted Trump would never really do tariffs, which he did do, then used to describe how he would never enforce his red line against Iran and bomb them, which he also did do.
Trump reversed the vast majority of his tariffs (either voluntarily or because he was forced to) and the US’ balance of trade hasn’t changed in a favorable way.
TACO is true. Trump didn’t invade Iran, and he didn’t implement long term tariffs of the kind necessary to reverse the trade imbalance that was his original problem.
Tariffs are the highest in 100 years. And we are at war with Iran.
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it was more like he would slap a high tariff and then back down , either giving some ultimatum or reducing the duty. The "taco trade" was buying the dip whenever he initially slapped a tariff in anticipation of him backtracking or extending a deadline, which he always did.
Trump wrote an entire book about how when entering a negotiation you should always open with what you see as your maximalist demands and then adjust based on how your counterpart responds.
Yet people such as yourself insist on acting like a man doing exactly what he told you that he was going to do is somehow out of character.
If this is the framework you apply to putative instances of TACO, then a corollary of applying it to the would-be televised execution is that Trump also sees his relationship with the American electorate as an adversarial negotiation.
Trump has executed on more of his campaign promises than basically every other president of the last fifty years. It’s another thing if you don’t like what he’s doing.
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TACO isn't a claim that Trump is acting out of character - the "A" is explicitly a claim that he is acting in character.
Though if you are going to argue about Trump's character based on Art of the Deal it should be pointed out that Trump didn't write the book, and the man who did has repudiated it.
I think the conversation about “Art of the Deal” is more interesting than I can do justice in a fly-by culture war reply guy lore tour. But I think the book is “real” and a valid way to analyze Trump.
In short: ghostwriter Tony Schwartz clearly worked extensively with Trump and the book is Trump. Trump’s voice comes through clearly. The stories in the book are all derived from the working life of Donald Trump. (Chapter one is just a recitation of a week of Trump’s business calendar.) Stylistically the book is similar to its sequels, which were ghostwritten by different writers. And the book, fundamentally, presents keys to Trump’s personality and methods that match exactly what we see from Trump in public. It’s not as though Schwartz invented a new character completely unrelated to the man Donald Trump.
I think sometimes about Trump after the escalator up until the first Republican debate. When he would introduce himself to the public he wouldn’t call himself a real estate developer or a reality TV star. He lead by calling himself the author of “The Art of the Deal”. Obviously it was ghost-written so we can just dismiss that as braggadocio and move on if you like. But I think it’s interesting that out of all possible angles that that’s what Trump lead with. I think it’s because there’s something in “Deal” that matches exactly what Trump tries to portray himself as, it’s the most flattering mask. And consider that if you watch “The Apprentice” the show basically narratively portrays Trump as God.
Newt Gingrich, who has written several books about Trump now, concluded in an interview that Trump is aware that he’s playing a character, and that the character is Donald Trump. Newt said something like, Trump knows that he has to wake up every day and act like Donald Trump, or he doesn’t get to be Donald Trump. The image is the substance. This is in a way deeply in-line with Washington and Franklin as canny purveyors of their own public personae.
Anyways I think it’s apparent that “Deal” contains an explanation of Trump’s behavior in conducting negotiations that is much more complete than basically any other theory proffered in the public square. And it’s worth a lot more attention than dismissing it as ghostwritten.
The problem with using "Art of the Deal" to understand Trump's approach to dealmaking is that it doesn't cover the most interesting and important aspect of it, which is how he rats out of the deals after he makes them.
The surprising thing about Trump is that most of the people who have done substantial amounts of business with him, in a wide range of capacities and over multiple decades and four very different careers*, say that he is dishonest, that his dishonesty hurt them personally, and that other people should shun him. And yet somehow he keeps finding new marks willing to do business with him. "Art of the Deal" is a book about how he takes the sucker, and the interesting and difficult bit of running cons at scale is how you manage the flow of new suckers into the game and the flow of angry suckers out of it.
* GC in his father's org, real estate developer in his own right, reality TV star and politician. I acknowledge that he was spectacularly successful in three of his careers - my problem with the man is his base character, not his lack of ability.
Is it most? Or is it some, which is then fixated on by motivated reasoners? The bank he was fined a half a billion dollars for defrauding said they were happy with the business they did and would do it again. Disputes with contractors are normal and common; in my own limited experience I've seen both sides of it. Is there a fair-minded reason to think Trump is notably worse than average for the industry?
Compare that to Obama who supposedly stiffed workers on, er, 100% of his construction projects, his presidential library. A library whose workers are now unionizing to counter how badly they're being exploited and shortchanged. Is that a fair description of Barak Obama? Should that be the subject of 10k articles?
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this was not news to to me. this is what I expected and i bought stocks in on the dip on April 2025 expecting him to do that
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