This Was a TACO Week For The Ages

Donald the Dealmaker had quite the week. 

Let's flash back to Monday, when TACO Trump once again delayed tariffs against China: 

President Donald Trump on Monday delayed high U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods from snapping back into place for another 90 days, a White House official told CNBC.

Those tariffs were set to resume Tuesday. But Trump signed an executive order hours beforehand that extends the deadline until mid-November, according to the official.

The delay was the expected outcome from the latest round of talks between U.S. trade negotiators and their Chinese counterparts, which took place in Stockholm in late July.

And of course, there was Friday's Alaska Appeasement to his boss, Vladimir Putin: 

The summit didn't achieve what Trump said beforehand he wanted most: A ceasefire. In their statements afterwards, the word "ceasefire" wasn't mentioned.

Trump also had set a series of deadlines for Russia to agree to progress or face secondary sanctions. The most recent deadline passed on Aug. 8, the day they agreed to meet in Alaska. After the summit, he didn't mention the word "sanctions" either.

By the next morning, after all, a "mere Ceasefire Agreement" was no longer the goal.

If anyone else bookended a week like this, he wouldn't be asked back to the office on Monday. But being a lifelong mediocre White man, Donald Trump has been shielded from accountability for his entire life. With countless failed business ventures throughout his career, Trump has always been bailed out by either his father, the Russians, or Deutsche Bank. Mark Burnett resurrected his flailing career by gifting him a reality TV show despite Trump himself being so inept that the program would routinely have to undergo massive edits to match Trump's arbitrary selection of whom to send home. It took a Marco Rubio debate comment in February of 2016 to learn of the absolute scam that was Trump University and, of course, Trump later failed to face repercussions for the scam as he was bailed out by none other than his current Attorney General Pam Bondi. No matter how corrupt or inept he has been, Donald Trump has always had those close to him willing to clean up his mistakes. 

But no longer. 

Now, on the global stage, Trump has to come to terms with the fact that daddy dearest can no longer make up for his failings. And while Pam Bondi may continue to protect him domestically, when it comes to international trade deals, Trump has nobody of fine repute in his corner that actually has the guts to stand up to him. Instead, Trump has a bunch of sniveling sycophants like Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff, John Ratcliffe, Scott Bessent, and Howard Lutnick joining him in Russia to simply nod and smile whenever Trump attempts to outsmart a former KGB agent. With zero empathy for the besieged people of Ukraine and zero understanding of the geopolitical ramifications of allowing Russia to annex a sovereign nation, Trump's submissive stooges are there for decorative purposes only: they have no say in any attempted deal that Donald Trump is about to make. 

Or not make.

What we all witnessed on Friday was Trump once again choking when given the chance to go one-on-one with Vladimir Putin. Because as we all know, Putin has Trump by the balls. Trump waltzed into his second term honestly believing that he could end the war in Ukraine with a simple call to Putin. But Daddy Vladdy has no interest in a ceasefire and he has no interest in letting Trump take any sort of credit for the war's outcome. Putin knows Trump is desperate for that Nobel Peace Prize and is able to hang that over him like a piñata over a child's birthday party. Throughout his entire life, Trump has never faced someone who has come into a deal with the upper hand and who knows how weak Trump truly is. We're seeing in real time one man playing chess and the other one playing hula hoop with an Aerobie. Never before have we had an American president so completely out of his league when it comes to international diplomacy. 

For five-plus decades Donald Trump was able to fake it. He got bailed out time and time again. He could bully small contractors with whom he would refuse to pay full price for their services. He was always able to use his money as the ultimate enforcer. But on the global stage, his money means nothing. Xi Jinping doesn't care about Trump's net worth. Neither does Putin. For the first time in his life, Donald Trump hasn't been able to bribe or extort his way out of a situation. From tariffs to trade deals and now to Ukraine, the world is seeing Donald Trump get outsmarted time and time again by both our allies and our adversaries. Trump is outmatched and outclassed. The man who claimed to write The Art of The Deal in fact has no clue what to do and he is continuing to pile up losses, each more embarrassing than the last. At this point, the world is laughing at Donald Trump and the TACO memes are becoming more and more ubiquitous.

With Donald Trump being a true novice in geopolitics, the United States has become a global laughingstock. It will take a generation or longer for the world to once again see the U.S. as a beacon for hope and prosperity. Knowing that the voters of seven swing states can elect a reality show political neophyte to multiple terms, our allies have begun moving on from always assuming that the United States will be there as a stable force for good in our world. Donald Trump's performance this past week showed how flaccid American leadership has become when dealing with self-proclaimed "deadlines" with our adversaries. America has become that parent that continuously threatens to ground their child but whose child knows that these are idle threats and nothing more. And like that child, our adversaries know that Trump is nothing but talk and that he'll never actually follow through on what he has said he will do. After a lifetime of being the biggest man in the room, Trump is finally being seen as a small, weak, and feeble man who is incapable of making any significant deals on his own.

A portrait that the American people should have seen long ago.