During the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan’s continued refrain about President Jimmy Carter was “There he goes again,” to imply how predictable Carter was.
In the case of Iran, there Trump goes again.
Analysts, financial markets, and allied government officials alike were caught off guard by Trump’s seemingly abrupt reversal in Iran. On Tuesday, he declared a two-week ceasefire, merely hours after threatening to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age and knock out all of Iran’s bridges, infrastructure, and power plants. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the ceasefire announcement, financial markets reacted drastically, with oil prices immediately down 20% and U.S. stock futures up nearly 3%.
But no one should have been surprised by Trump’s flip-flopping. In our book, Trump’s Ten Commandments, we presciently and repeatedly predicted exactly this outcome, because it fits perfectly with Trump’s long-established patterns of behavior. As we argue in Trump’s Ten Commandments, regardless of whether you like him, loathe him, or want to look away, Trump is the most consequential person alive today, and to anticipate his actions, one must understand how he thinks and why he does what he does.
Here’s why Trump’s flip on Iran was perfectly predictable.
A punch to the face
Trump’s second commandment is to start negotiations with a punch to the face. In the case of Iran, this meant a threat to wipe out civilian infrastructure and that a “whole civilization” will die, “never to be brought back again.”
While many took Trump’s threats to knock out all of Iran’s power plants and target civilian infrastructure and his own self-imposed 8 p.m. deadline seriously, we presciently predicted that this threat was more smoke and bluster than genuine substance. While some critics have contended that by setting an 8 p.m. deadline, Trump boxed himself in, we took it for exactly what Trump intended: merely the opening salvo in the behind-the-scenes peace dialogue, facilitated by Pakistan and a number of other Arab mediators.
It’s part of the classic Trump negotiation playbook. Instead of building trust incrementally, Trump starts every negotiation by punching you in the face. In his view, it’s escalate to de-escalate; by seizing the initiative, he can maximize his leverage right off the bat, or so his thinking goes.
The Trump market
Trump’s fourth commandment is that he sees money as a scorecard. And in this case, the market was screaming for peace.
Trump is the most business and markets-attuned President ever. He often views financial markets as a real-time barometer of success. For weeks, Trump successfully managed market conditions by escalating on Friday or Saturday and then de-escalating on Monday, creating early week rallies that could last through the week. But the luster wore off as market participants grew wise to Trump’s way, and realized a disconnect between his rhetoric and his actions.
As oil skyrocketed past $100 a barrel, as 30-year bond yields rose toward 5% with mortgage rates surging, and as U.S. stock markets tumbled into correction territory, the market did what so many of Trump’s adversaries have failed to do—they served as an incontrovertible check on his power.
Flips galore
Commandment number seven is that the world is made up of winners and losers. In this worldview, flips are common.
Virtually untethered by any ideology, Trump suffers no fools and has little permanent loyalty to any faction or belief system. That fluid, shape-shifting pragmatism was on full display throughout the last two weeks. What many thought was his seeming vacillation between Iran hawks and doves, threatening to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age one day while sounding bullish on peace negotiations the next, was in reality a reflection of how Trump always provides himself maximum strategic flexibility, keeping all options on the table.
Trump sees his flip from listening to Iran hawks such as Senator Lindsey Graham to empowering Iran doves such as JD Vance, as a feature, not a bug.
Rewriting history through the sleeper effect
Always declare victory, no matter the outcome. This is Trump’s eighth commandment.
By relentlessly repeating his own version of events with absolute certainty, Trump attempts to rewrite reality. Through sheer volume and repetition, his assertions are eventually accepted as facts by his followers, regardless of their actual veracity.
It was always clear that no matter the outcome, Trump would find some pretext to declare victory, as he always does, and relentless repeat that narrative. In repeating the same narrative of triumph after triumph over and over again, strategic disappointments such as the failure to remove Iran’s 440 kg of 60% enriched uranium, or the fact Iran retains significant ballistic missile and offensive capabilities, and no substantive changes to Iran’s theocratic regime, fall by the wayside. It is paradoxical that critics and supporters of Donald Trump alike are so often caught flat-footed by Trump’s ostensibly abrupt reversals, when the groundwork for those reversals are often being laid in plain sight, for all to see—if they know what signs to look for. Trump’s Ten Commandments reveals that Trump’s Iran ceasefire was anything but surprising and mirror his career-long instincts across politics and business, war, and peace.
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