TACO Trump’s latest U-turn is his most embarrassing yet

Not for nothing is Donald Trump known as the “TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) President”. He announces major decisions and issues dire threats on impulse or whim – and occasionally out of pure spite – and then scraps them.

But even by this own shameless standards Trump’s abandonment of his so-called Project Freedom to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is the granddaddy of all TACO somersaults.

The official White House version is that Project Freedom is being “paused” for “a short period of time” to see if a peace deal with Iran can be reached. “Great progress” has been made towards that end, claimed Trump, without a shred of evidence.

The president has performed so many U-turns and flip-flops he makes Sir Keir Starmer, criticised for more than a dozen policy climb downs, look like a model of constancy and resolution by comparison.

A more likely explanation is that he was told that Project Freedom never had a hope of working and was almost guaranteed to make the war much worse not end it. Experts were near unanimous in warning that it was likely to end the fragile ceasefire between the US and America and renew the ‘hot war’ between them.

Indeed, some five year olds could have told him that. In ripping up Project Freedom, almost before the ink was dry on the official White House communication, Trump has also humiliated the two men tasked with implementing his defence and foreign policy: Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio.

They announced details of Project Freedom amid great fanfare in two major press conferences by the pair. Hegseth, who revels in using warlike language – he changed his job title Secretary of State for Defence to Secretary of State for War – boldly declared that the US Project Freedom to escort commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz was Trump’s “gift to the world”.

Rubio said the president was determined to rescue 2,000 stranded ships and 20,000 merchant sailors “left for dead” in the Strait of Hormuz. After falling over themselves to praise Trump, within hours he repaid their fawning loyalty by publicly making fools of them and ditching the initiative.

Iran’s response to the US move was to claim Trump had “retreated” in an attempt to “cover up the failure” of his short-lived military strategy. For all the evils of the brutal Tehran regime, it is hard to challenge its assessment on this occasion.

Trump’s TACO tendency on Iran has even surfaced in his attitude to them playing in the forthcoming football World Cup being hosted in America. Having previously said it would not be “appropriate” for Iran to take part in the competition, a few days ago he gave it his blessing, declaring: “Let them play”.

Indeed, the TACO approach has come to define Tump’s foreign and economic policy. One minute he announces swingeing tariffs on a nation, at times in response to a perceived slight, the next they are withdrawn. Remember his ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs unveiled in the White House Rose Garden a year ago, with Trump, like TV reality show host he once was, holding a large white board detailing which countries faced which tariffs?

Within days it was suspended after triggering a stock market crash. Instead he negotiated individual deals, including one with the UK. At the more extreme end on the global stage, threats to invade Greenland and to take over Canada have come to nothing, so far at least.

In the early stages of his presidency, Trump warned Vladimir Putin of “very severe consequences” including punitive sanctions if he did not support a ceasefire in Ukraine.

Instead he handed Putin a huge publicity coup by meeting him for peace talks in Alaska last year which led nowhere – and told Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky it was up to him to end the war by giving up land seized by Russia.

Trump’s TACO reputation in fact dates back to his first term in the White House. He threatened “fire and fury” against North Korea only to back down and attempt talks with them instead. He vowed to wipe Afghanistan “off the face of the earth” – just as he talked recently of returning Iran “to the stone age”. In the event he paved the way for America’s humbling later withdrawal from Afghanistan, handing it over to the Taliban

He has repeated the pattern to such an extent that it spawned a whole new money making racket in Wall Street known as ‘TACO trade’. It is a term for describing buying stocks and shares at a bargain price following an announcement of tariff rises by Trump, then selling them for a profit when he changes his mind and their value rises again.

Sir John Sawers, former head of Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency, said Trump’s latest switch on Iran showed we are “living in an Alice In Wonderland world” whereby the “ceasefire is intact as long as the president says it is intact”.

Every intelligence agency in the world could have told Trump before he launched the war that it would result in Iran retaliating by blocking the Strait of Hormuz. The reality was that Trump was ‘trying to get out of the conflict,’ said Sir John. To put it another way, it is clearest evidence yet that he is the ‘TACO’ President.