Escalating to Deescalate

There’s now a clear pattern we should add as a refinement to the TACO rule

“Sometimes you have to escalate to de-escalate.” That’s according to Israel, when it stepped up its attacks against Hezbollah in 2024.

Those are also the remarkable words of U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who made the same assertion over the weekend when discussing the crisis over the Strait of Hormuz.

Bessent has served as the face of the Trump regime’s Iran War policy, appearing on the Sunday talk shows in place of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Bessent’s heavy presence signals where Trump’s true concerns lie: the economy.

He has reason to be worried. Gas prices are surging, fuel supplies have dropped to critical levels for many manufacturing hubs in Asia, and the shortages are driving up the price of everything from fertilizer (which inevitably means higher food prices) to helium needed in medicine and chipmaking.

“Escalate to deescalate” is Orwellian but quite telling. We’re already familiar with the TACO rule: Trump Always Chickens Out. To this we should add a wrinkle: he’ll make things much worse before he backs down.

Let’s take a quick look at some instances of this pattern, apply it to Iran, and then look ahead to see where else it may emerge.

Escalating tariffs before TACOing out

TACO first emerged as an observation among financial market traders. When Trump first announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs, the world was caught unprepared. Equity, bond and currency markets responded negatively, and the White House quickly realized it had a problem.

When China raised tariffs in response, Trump escalated the trade war to absurd levels, announcing triple digit tariffs. But the Chinese knew that Trump was a paper tiger. Besides, they had an ace in the hole: rare earth minerals. China has cornered the market on these inputs, and if it began to restrict or freeze out the West, then all manner of manufactured goods, from automobiles to aviation, would have to slow or even shut down.

Trump soon backed off the sky-high tariffs and dropped them back down to earth. They were still high enough to drive up inflation and send a shudder through the global economy. But the worst of the threats never came to pass. Trump escalated, then chickened out and deescalated.

National Guard and ICE surges

In response to protests against ICE in the Los Angeles area, Trump federalized the California National Guard and sent it to assist ICE with protecting federal facilities and conducting immigration enforcement. Then he began a series of escalations, federalizing and attempting to deploy troops in Portland, Oregon and in Chicago, Illinois and its surrounding suburbs.

He was met with court challenges on his troop deployments, that appeared likely to succeed. So he escalated by surging ICE and Border Patrol agents into Minneapolis. But to the surprise of the White House, the local populace responded with huge protests and organized resistance. After an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross killed unarmed U.S. citizen Renée Good, the White House escalated again, referring to her as a “domestic terrorist” and doubling down on its unconstitutional home searches and roving patrols.

That led, tragically and inevitably, to the death of peaceful protester and U.S. citizen, Alex Pretti, at the hands of multiple Border Patrol agents. Following that, Trump demoted Greg Bovino, sent in Tom Homan, and ended the ICE surge. But he also escalated enforcement actions so that the retreat would appear from a position of strength, even though it was the public pressure that has forced the backdown. (ICE abuses continue in that city, but the number of agents is markedly lower.)

The Iran War

The war in the Persian Gulf isn’t going as expected. Despite a massive and constant bombardment of Iran’s military positions and the destruction of its weaponry and navy, Iran remains a hornet’s nest that Trump has kicked. And he’s somehow surprised that the hornets remain furious and won’t stop stinging.

The big escalation came this weekend. Trump issued an ultimatum to Iran via a Truth Social post, where he threatened to bomb Iran’s energy infrastructure unless it opened the Strait of Hormuz in 48 hours.

Iran predictably told him to take a hike and proceeded to threaten retaliation against energy facilities and desalination plants in neighboring Arab countries.

As Trump’s social media-delivered deadline drew near, world markets slumped and oil prices spiked as traders worried what new chaos would result upon the deadline’s expiration.

True to form, the TACO moment came this morning. In a new Truth Social post, Trump claimed, without evidence, that the two sides had held “good conversations” about hostilities ending, and that he was postponing the strikes for five days.

Once again, Trump has apparently chickened out—but not before escalating so that he could deescalate. Markets rejoiced, but traders should have seen this coming. Insiders probably made millions on the bounce.

And Iran, which had previously denied seeking a cease-fire, confirmed that it really didn’t have to do anything but wait for this inevitable backpedal by Trump. His backing down today reduces any future escalatory threats by him to fairly weak tea.

Next up?

Over the weekend, chaos struck multiple large airports as a shortage of TSA workers, who aren’t being paid through the DHS shutdown fight, failed to show up for work. This caused hours-long delays for travelers with some eye-popping images of security lines snaking through baggage claim areas and into parking lots.

The White House could end the DHS shutdown and return airports to normal operations by agreeing to Democrats’ demands. These include the basic demand that ICE agents comport themselves like any other law enforcement agency, including not wearing identity-hiding masks, only entering and searching homes with judicially signed warrants, and using body cameras during enforcement actions.

Instead of agreeing to these common sense reforms, the White House declared that it would send ICE agents into thirteen of the nation’s largest airports to “assist” TSA with the crowds. The list of targeted airports, per CNN, includes the following:

• Chicago-O’Hare International Airport

• Cleveland Hopkins International Airport

• Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport

• Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport

• John F. Kennedy International Airport (New York)

• LaGuardia Airport (New York)

• Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport

• Luis Muñoz Marin International Airport (San Juan, Puerto Rico)

• Newark Liberty International Airport

• Philadelphia International Airport

• Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport

• Pittsburgh International Airport

• Southwest Florida International Airport (Fort Myers, Florida)

It isn’t clear what roles and responsibilities the largely untrained agents will have, but Trump declared in his announcement of the action that they would “do security like no one has ever seen before,” including “the immediate arrest of all illegal immigrants who have come into our Country.”

This is a recipe for chaos. If ICE agents begin appearing in uniform in significant numbers at these cities’ airports, and they begin public enforcement actions against perceived “illegal immigrants,” this risks public confrontations. It is a combustible mix to pit ICE against thousands of passengers already fed up with delays, many of whom see ICE’s unchecked abuses as the cause.

Trump of course thrives on this kind of chaos, and if things with ICE get out of hand at our airports, it could shift the narrative again, this time away from the Iran War, which was itself designed to distract the public from the Epstein files.

What Trump fails to understand is that each big escalation and even bigger retreat leaves more voters outraged and organized against him. The American public continues to suffer the consequences of his reckless behavior, from soaring energy and food prices to terrorized and traumatized neighborhoods and communities. As his approval numbers slip further into deep red territory, even on his once signature issues of the economy and immigration, so do his party’s chances of holding on to power after the midterms.

We can therefore expect him to further escalate ahead of the upcoming elections as well—and ultimately to back down if those threats are met head-on with unyielding resistance.