Art of the deal

A useful rule, when trying to understand current affairs, is AAL: Acronyms Always Lie.A case in point would be the acronym of the year so far: TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out). It means that Donald Trump is always bluffing and, when push finally comes to shove, he folds.TACO has caught on since Liberation Day and the onset of Trump 2.0’s tariff agenda, and is now deployed again and again to describe the President’s latest ceasefire with Iran. Over free trade, Greenland, and the Middle East, he’s shown himself to be a playground bully who loves to intimidate adversaries only to cave whenever the going gets tough.

Is Donald Trump a more sophisticated mathematical thinker than we give him credit for? The other day, on one of the Sunday talk shows, a lawyer named Sarah Isgur explained the logic Trump was following in throwing the book at those who had once done the same to him. Isgur, who served in the first Trump administration, sees in the President’s actions something more sophisticated than mere revenge: “What you will hear from those people in the Department of Justice is: this is what deterrence theory is about. When you’re playing a cooperative game and the other side defects,” Isgur said, “then you hit them back disproportionately to create that deterrence.

"He [Donald Trump] sees American leadership as merely a series of real estate transactions." That was the verdict of the Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin following the President’s address to Congress. Trump 2.0 does, admittedly, have the appearance of a political version of The Art of the Deal, in which the Donald is prepared to leverage a bilateral compact with every country in the world — so long as the price is right. There are no friends in The Art of the Deal, no permanent friends anyway, only prospective business associates. Ukraine wants the flow of armaments to resume? Sign over the rights to half your natural resources.