With the failure of negotiations in Islamabad, last week’s “TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) Tuesday” has left less of an impression than the odor of a gas station restroom.
I envy the confidence of those who publicly broadcast their faith in the TACO maxim in lead-up to Donald Trump folding on threats to war-crime Iran. The ability to hold no doubt in your mind that Trump will always, inevitably, backs down from his most unhinged threats likely leads to sleep more untroubled than mine. Trump does follow through on his ghastly ultimatums. He does not always chicken out. Look at the tariffs, imposed imperfectly but crushing use still. Ask the people of the Twin Cities. Or, for that matter, Iran.
Whether predictions that Trump will inevitably knuckle under are sincere or not, confidence always performs better than nuance. What I have to tell you is this: The only constant in Trump’s decision-making, whether he follows through on his latest insane idea or backtracks—either as a result of real world blowback or him suddenly losing interest—is his enormous capacity for delusion. Anyone correctly predicting his action is the preson who talked to him the soonest before the decision is announced.
The true line in Trump’s decision-making is not, unfortunately, some essential cowardice. It’s transactional nihilism. The transactionality is well-documented, almost hilariously obvious. He conceives of every interaction as a means to some end. Newly apparent is the changeable nature of those ends. They are gaseous, conforming to the container of his last conversation.
Observe recent Polymarket trades: The most successful bets on Trump’s Iran reversal last week happened mere hours before he announced he’d stumbled back from the brink.
One user, who created his account seven hours before Trump’s Truth Social post about the ceasefire, made $200,000. Suspiciously well-timed bets are not just predicting whether and when Trump chickens out, either. Last month, The New York Times reported that hundreds of “eleventh hour” bettors made hundreds of thousands betting on Friday that Trump would bomb Iran on Saturday. (Last week, White House staffers got an email warning them to not participate in prediction markets related to domestic politics since, as one official told The Wall Street Journal, “Congress and other government officials should be prohibited from using nonpublic information for financial benefit.” Presumably this does not apply to the Trump children, who are investors in Polymarket itself.)
Trump doesn’t necessarily want to control the flow of oil or the strategic shipping straits, achieve peace, or get credit for forcing regime change. He wants all of those things, or none of them! Maybe he wants some secret other thing: a Big Mac, a blow job, the love of his father.
Crucially, because his own desires have no anchor, he cannot conceive that others hold wants and needs that can’t be dealt down, negotiated, shifted entirely. All offers and threats are contingent. Everything is just an opening bid. That’s how he can promise civilizational destruction and believe that walking it back should still result in good-faith negotiations.
I suspect he regards bombings themselves as no more consequential than a rejected settlement in a lawsuit—as long as he dangles the promise of helping to rebuild (it’s the second, more generous offer) how can victims hold it against him? He expected to dicker over the presence of ICE goons (while holding government funds hostage) with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey after the assassination of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. He promises to “redevelop” a devastated Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” as if the problem was a lack of topless beaches and casinos and not food and potable water.
This is not the art of deal. Transactional nihilism is existentially unstable. Some opening moves can’t be undone. He seems to truly believe that his wholesale wrecking of the economy is just a temporary downturn and that Americans will be made whole after all the numbers go back up. He clearly holds a fantasy about tariffs leading to the magical reinvention of American manufacturing and the dissolution of the income tax. But there is no quick repair for how he has flippantly remade both household economics and large-scale institutions.
America’s academic and research infrastructure will take generations to rebuild, if they come back at all. A recent survey by the academic journal Nature found that 75 percent of U.S.-based career scientists are considering leaving the country, most commonly for Europe or Canada. Among post-doc students, it’s close to 80 percent. Then there are the researchers that won’t even arrive on these shores to start building our future: New international student enrollment in the US fell by 17 percent in 2025, the largest single year decrease in history. (An analysis by the National Association of International Educators posited that this drop has led to the loss of $1.1B in contributions to the US economy and the elimination of 23,000 related jobs.)
The fears he has instilled about the future among ordinary Americans, the realtime physical terror he’s kindled in immigrants and queer people: these insecurities will undercut the way most Americans feel about the sturdiness of their democracy. And democracy, to function, needs some bedrock of belief that it has a chance to continue.
Voter disengagement and distrust in national institutions propelled Trump into the White House; now he continues to sabotage them from the inside. Ironically, the left’s best chance at ousting him lies in framing that distrust of the government as a reaction to abandonment by it.
All of Trump’s various bids and offers have meaning and impact. His blindness to this is why he was not a successful real estate developer. His transactionalism was not the great tactic over which he believes he has exclusive ownership. I was once a party to a real estate deal where the opening bid was so low it derailed the entire relationship. It triggered more lawyers, delays, a longer process and a losing deal for all parties when an honest and fair starting point might have been a win-win. The insult resonated to the point where all anyone wanted was revenge. The transactional nihilism of my counterpart didn’t even serve his own purpose. For my followers of international relations out there, does this sound familiar?
This utter inability to imagine that threats and promises have meaning beyond themselves is likely what gives the appearance of ruthlessness—but ruthlessness implies a goal; “madman theory” still requires a rational goal to be worth the manic pursuit. Trump’s untethered id is monstrous, chaotic, morally empty, inherently untethered to any goals beyond the ego boost he receives from using power. An elite few have stumbled upon a way to use Trump’s vile eruptions to get rich or die trying. Most of us, alas, won’t have that first option. He may not be crazy, but he’s beyond reason.
