‘Armageddon TACO Shuffle’: Ed Luce Says Trump Kept ‘Thrashing’ Between ‘Ideas’ in Iran Interview

Morning Joe contributor Ed Luce revealed that President Donald Trump kept “thrashing” between “ideas” on how he wanted to proceed with Iran during a phone interview, pivoting between forcibly seizing the country’s oil and insisting peace talks were proceeding well, a rhetorical dance Luce branded the “armageddon TACO shuffle.”

Luce, a columnist for the Financial Times, called into the MS NOW studio on Tuesday morning to reveal details about his 15-minute impromptu phone interview with the president, which had happened a day earlier.

Jokingly referring to “TACO” – the viral Wall Street acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out” – Luce suggested that the president pushed strategies at both extremes of his optionality, as he relayed his plans:

It was the second [conversation] that I had with him, really just cold calling him, you know, as one does. And he was toggling between what I call the ‘armageddon TACO shuffle’ in that he was, you know, talking about taking Iran’s oil and how easy it would be to seize Kharg island, referring to the Venezuela model of regime change by taking out the head and doing business, including oil business, with the remains of it, but then shifting to saying that, that he was having great talks with the Iranian regime.

Asked by host Joe Scarborough what the president had said about Iran’s oil, Luce revealed that even though he “wasn’t pressing” Trump “on oil” — the president “kept raising oil.”

He continued:

He kept raising it and saying, ‘why wouldn’t we?’ and that the Kharg Island defenses were not that strong, ‘we have the capability to take it very easily.’ And of course, as you know, Joe, he was talking back in the 1980s when you had this Iran tanker war in the Gulf, he was talking in ‘87 as a New York figure about America should just go in and take the oil. It’s a recurring thought, you know, in his mind over a period of decades.

But it was slightly in tension with what he was saying about, well, now they’re letting 20 tankers through, I believe these are Pakistan-flagged tankers. ‘But the Iranians have given me an even bigger gift and even bigger present, 20 tankers.’ And of course, you know that that in a way, it’s a little bit awkward because that in a way demonstrates Iran’s ability to control who goes in and who goes out.

Luce added that Trump also had “a few choice words” about NATO allies and, in particular, the United Kingdom for failing to get substantially involved in the conflict, despite his appeals, but that he did not “sense anger” in the president.

“I sensed a little bit of sort of thrashing around for ideas because, you know, other than this stress on the indirect talks and these 20 ships that have been permitted to go through the strait, it didn’t sound like he had a whole lot of ideas as to how to get out of this situation,” he concluded.

Watch above via MS NOW.

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