Trump can’t 'chicken out' of his campaign of destruction: conservative

U.S. President Donald Trump at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, U.S., March 7, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

On Wall Street, the TACO meme (Trump Always Chickens Out) has been used to mock U.S. President Donald Trump's pattern of threatening countries with steep tariffs only to back down from his threats. But some Trump critics find the meme problematic, arguing that Trump follows through on some of his worst ideas — from trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results to using the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to pursue bogus criminal charges against his foes.

Never Trump conservative Bill Kristol applies the TACO concept to Trump's war against Iran in a March 10 column for The Bulwark. But he warns that "chickening out" is difficult when a campaign of "violence and destruction" is involved.

"Yesterday, we saw the mother of all TACO trades," Kristol explains. "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."

The Never Trump conservative continues, "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."

Kristol stresses that "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," Kristol writes. "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."

Kristol continues, "After all, the macho stuff has been central to the war effort…. Indeed, it's central to fascism, including in its Trumpist iteration…. 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..… For Trump's war, I think it's TACO time."

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