Sam Stein Slams Trump Critics for Piling on Prez With ‘TACO’ Comments: ‘Not About Chickening Out’

The Bulwark’s Sam Stein rebuked President Donald Trump’s critics for piling on with “TACO” comments after he stepped back from earlier threats to accept a ceasefire proposal late Tuesday.

Trump accepted a framework tied to a two-week delay in further escalation hours before the self-imposed deadline issued in earlier threats in which he vowed to “wipe out” the entirety of Iran’s “civilization” if the regime failed to comply with his demands.

Posting on Truth Social before the deadline, the president called the deal a “big day for World Peace” and said the U.S. “will be helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz,” the crucial waterway through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply passes and which has effectively remained closed during the past month of conflict.

Trump said Iran had put forward a “workable” 10-point peace plan to end the war, though he later described the proposal as fraudulent without providing further detail.

The late-stage ceasefire agreement was mocked by some, including late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, as an example of the president having “TACO’d” – a reference to a Wall Street acronym predicting “Trump always chickens out.”

Speaking on MS NOW’s Morning Joe on Wednesday, Stein countered that the recent situation was “not about chickening out” as he warned that Trump’s “brinkmanship” was not “cost-free”:

This was not a cost-free four weeks. We spent hundreds of billions of dollars, our munitions stockpile is depleted. There are 13 service members who have died. There are thousands of Iranians who have died. An elementary school was bombed in Iran. Infrastructure, critical energy infrastructure, in a number of states was damaged or completely ruined. That has to now be reconstituted. And then, as David [Ignatius] mentions, all the other stuff: reopening the Strait, it’s not going to happen now, we have to apparently have a surcharge on ships.

So I go about this stuff and I know people like to pile on Trump in these moments and say, ‘well, he TACO’d’ and you know, ‘he was always going to TACO’ and I just think that’s just the wrong framework because it’s not about chickening out. This brinksmanship has real, tangible costs, real costs, a substantial cost, not just over the past four weeks, but going forward.

How do any Gulf state allies, how do they rearrange their geopolitical thinking around this? How are the Europeans ever going to trust us again when we said to them, ‘you have to go reopen the Strait’? I mean how does this reorient the global world in a matter of just four weeks?

Watch above via MS NOW.

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