The Impulsive Administration

When short term wins trumps everything else, it presents more troubles than victories

Changing titles (Photo Credit: PBS)

In late May to early June, a specific phrase used exclusively by Wall Street has seeped into the mainstream: TACO, or Trump Always Chickens Out.

For market gurus, TACO references Trump’s tendency to threaten tariffs against other countries, but then delay or reduce them as a negotiating chip. Traders would buy stocks after a tariff announcement pushes down stock prices, and when the delay or reduction is announced, they would sell these stocks at a profit once the market rebounds.

Since the term was popularized, pundits and politicians have repeatedly used TACO as a joke or jab at the president, much to his frustration. However, it also speaks to the US President’s go-to political tactic that has dramatic consequences for himself, the US, and the world.

Whether you like Trump or not, everyone knows the current sitting president has a knack for not thinking things through. By making swift decisions without considering the consequences, Trump would do anything to demonstrate he is winning in front of his supporters.

Now, the environment has set up the perfect storm for Trump to look tougher and stronger. The Epstein saga is sticking to the president's reputation in a way no other scandal has before, with a small part of the MAGA base being more skeptical and less supportive of Trump in the past few weeks. More broadly, his support among Americans is falling, while on key issues such as immigration and law enforcement, his strong issues are also seeing declining support due to the administration’s cruel tactics that border on authoritarianism.

As a result, Trump would do anything to create “wins” for his administration. Most recently, Trump signed an executive order renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War. Trump said the name change was to send “a message of victory. I think it sends a message of strength,” while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed it will bring back a “warrior ethos.” But other than satisfying egos and proclaiming another administration “victory,” there’s not much substance in it. Tom Nichols, a retired professor at the US Naval War College, called the move the “Department of Cringe.”

It is almost impossible to overstate the inanity of this move. The United States has a Department of Defense for a reason. It was called the “War” Department until 1947, when the dictates of a new and more dangerous world required the creation of a much larger military organization than any in American history. Harry Truman and the American leaders who destroyed the Axis, and who now were facing the Soviet empire, realized that national security had become a larger undertaking than the previous American tradition of moving, as needed, between discrete conditions of “war” and “peace.”

…

And about that paperwork: The cost of renaming the DOD will run into tens of millions of dollars, maybe much more. Isn’t this an administration that only months ago unleashed an ignorant bazillionaire on the federal workforce in the name of efficiency and cost reductions? Everything from official seals to uniform patches and medals might have to be replaced—and for what? Because a president who never served a day in uniform and a macho-obsessed former Army major think that using words like war will provide the sense of purpose and gravity they both lack?

However, Trump’s impulsive stunts and political theater are mostly more consequential than some name changes. The constant desire to achieve short-term wins can sometimes cost lives, literally. Just take another case study that happened last week: The US carried out a strike in international waters, hitting an alleged drug-carrying vessel in the southern Caribbean, killing 11 people whom the Trump administration referred to as “narco-terrorists” from the Tren de Aragua.

Even though Trump and his supporters paraded the news as a key win for the administration, there are a few issues that come to mind. First of all, how is anyone sure that all of the 11 people onboard the boat are drug smugglers or “narco-terrorists?” What if there are innocents on board? Even if all of the 11 killed are what the administration accused, there is a technical term in law called innocent before proven guilty! Moreover, as the New York Times notes, the international law aspects of this incident are in murky waters.

That raises the question of whether Mr. Trump has legitimate authority to tell the military to summarily kill people it suspects are smuggling drugs — and whether the administration allowed career military lawyers to weigh in.

“It’s difficult to imagine how any lawyers inside the Pentagon could have arrived at a conclusion that this was legal rather than the very definition of murder under international law rules that the Defense Department has long accepted,” said Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor who worked as a Pentagon lawyer in 2015 and 2016.

…

Jeh Johnson, who served as the Pentagon general counsel and homeland security secretary in the Obama administration, noted that Congress had not authorized force against cartels, and that the Coast Guard and Navy had long interdicted suspected drug-smuggling boats.

“Here the president appears to be invoking his amorphous constitutional authority to kill low-level drug couriers on the high seas, with no due process, arrest or trial,” he said, adding: “Viewed in isolation, labeling drug cartels ‘terrorists’ and invoking the ‘national interests’ to use the U.S. military to summarily kill low-level drug couriers is pretty extreme.”

At least with the Venezuela case, Trump knows his move is creating an escalation with Maduro’s government. But in some cases, the “move fast and think things later” strategy can have unintended consequences.

If you have been paying attention to the news coming out of Tianjin last week, you might have seen photos and clips of Indian President Narendra Modi meeting and chatting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin during the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit. India has long been a country that switches sides between Beijing and Washington, and in the last few years, Sino-Indian relations have been frosty after border clashes in 2020. But for the most part, New Delhi has had a lukewarm to positive relationship with Washington. During the first Trump term, Modi even called him a friend.

However, that ship has sailed. Trump has shown good graces to Pakistan after it nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, while the Indian side previously criticized the US administration for not being involved in fostering a ceasefire deal after recent border conflicts in May. In addition, Trump has imposed punishing 50% levies on New Delhi, including 25% secondary tariffs for its purchase of Russian oil.

You could argue that Trump’s rapid-fire decisions against India could be used as leverage for Washington to soften India’s stance on trade and the Ukraine war, but that leaves out a big caveat: Other countries can work with fellow foreign countries. Analysts argue that Trump’s tariffs played a key role in pushing India to explore siding with China, and even if India does not fully embrace its Chinese and Russian partners, the optics from the meeting are sufficiently bad.

As Trump keeps trying to enact small wins, his narrow vision blinds the long-term success and legacy of his government, even if those wins are objectively good. Following the brief US intervention in the Israel-Iran conflict, I would hand it to Trump that the move does constitute a foreign policy success for the current US leader. Trump’s actions successfully prevented the conflict from escalating, while both the US and Israel have dealt a damaging (but not lethal) blow to Iran’s political and military establishment.

However, even though Trump can portray it as an actual victory, the question is, how long? Keep in mind, we are not sure whether the US strikes on facilities like Fordow have wiped out Tehran’s nuclear capabilities, and even the most optimistic assessments argued it only sets back Iran’s nuclear efforts by months, if not years. With the recent blow, Iran could take away the lesson that nuclear enrichment and the capability to create and possess nuclear weapons are the only ways to defend itself and protect its theocratic regime. After all, North Korea has nukes, and no country has yet launched military operations against it for the past several decades.

Some have argued that Trump’s decision from his first administration to leave the JCPOA, or more commonly referred to as the Iran nuclear deal, helps dissuade Iran from engaging in nuclear enrichment efforts. And if that comes true, many will see the brief Israel-Iran war not as a success, but a failure that pushed Tehran into fulfilling its nuclear ambitions.

That is the general failure of an impulse-driven foreign policy, and domestic policy as well. With all the political theater going on to portray the administration as working through a hot streak, there is a potent threat that those that Trump claim’s as today’s sucesses could come back to haunt him as defining failures of his presidency.