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“Trump always chickens out,” goes the popular anti-Trump slogan, often pithily abbreviated as “TACO” by the president’s detractors.

The past week has supplied ample evidence to support this theory of Trumpian trepidation, with the president first backing away from his threats to forcibly claim Greenland as U.S. territory, and then gradually backpedaling on the more aggressive elements of the administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota after federal officers shot and killed a protester over the weekend.

But the president’s recent reversals also suggest that the “TACO” slogan doesn’t get it exactly right. For politicians and policymakers seeking to understand him, it’s important to recognize that Trump doesn’t always back down — but he often will under specific circumstances.

It doesn’t make as tidy an acronym, but it’s increasingly proving to be true: When confronted with certain types of pushback — or a particular constellation of overlapping elements of resistance— Trump does seem inclined to reverse course.

One year into Trump’s second term, clear patterns have begun to emerge. Four categories of feedback seem to be especially effective at convincing Trump to change course: Widespread pushback from MAGA Republicans and their allies; wobbly markets, and especially bond markets; opposition from adversaries who confront Trump with unity and strength rather than supplication; and, finally, skepticism from conservative media figures who penetrate Trump’s notoriously insular information bubble.

In circumstances where he encounters more than one of these varieties of resistance, Trump frequently wavers. Consider his recent about-face on Greenland: Trump’s initial refusal to rule out military force sent markets tumbling, prompted public head-scratching from self-proclaimed MAGA allies in Europe and was met with unusually forceful resistance from European leaders, who banded together to oppose the move. Those three forces came to a head at the Global Economic Forum in Davos, and Trump backed down from the threat of using force.

Or look at the lead-up to Trump’s pivot on the administration’s increasingly lethal immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota. After senior members of the Trump administration jumped on the opportunity to vilify Alex Pretti, the protester killed by Border Patrol agents, a handful of Republicans who typically avoid clashing with Trump began to subtly signal their disapproval with the administration’s aggressive tactics and sharp-edged rhetoric.

They were joined by prominent figures from Trump’s preferred media ecosystem, like Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, who raised pointed questions about the administration’s account of the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by Border Patrol Officers in Minneapolis. After hearing Bartiromo’s on-air criticisms of the administration’s immigration hard-liners, Trump softened his stance and deployed his “border czar” Tom Homan to take over command from Border Patrol officials.

Both these episodes harken back to the situation that first gave rise to the “TACO” slogan: Trump’s walking back of his punishing “Liberation Day” tariffs last spring. Trump’s made-for-television declaration of a new global trade war spooked global markets — including bond markets, which Trump monitors closely to gauge the success of his economic policy. It also unsettled MAGA allies on Capitol Hill, who publicly aired their concerns that the tariff increases would hit consumers’ wallets. Bada-bing, bada-boom: Trump reversed course (while still landing on historically high tariff rates).

There are, of course, some necessary caveats to these categories. For instance, Trump seems largely indifferent to criticism from “Never Trumpers” or moderate Republicans — like Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Tom Tillis, all of whom routinely rebuff the president to little actual effect. For criticisms to really get through to Trump, they need to originate from Trump’s MAGA loyalists, who have carefully honed elaborate rhetorical strategies for signaling their displeasure with Trump’s policies without actually criticizing the president himself.

Although Trump seems to respond to opponents who stand up to him with force, that “force” doesn’t always look like blustery confrontation. New York City Mayor and self-proclaimed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani managed to disarm Trump with charm during their much-talked-about Oval Office meeting in November, prompting Trump to back off his more aggressive threats to target the Big Apple. Mamdani’s approach wasn’t forceful per se, but it stood in stark contrast to the mealy-mouthed supplication that many law firms, universities and corporations tried to use to placate Trump early in his term — and which seemed to embolden Trump rather than deter him.

Still, the past week has helped flesh out something like a playbook for changing Trump’s mind. If Trump meets two or more of these types of resistance, you can be pretty sure that a change is gonna come.

Welcome to POLITICO Forecast. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at forecast@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at iward@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) @ianwardreports.

Trump threatens Iran with ‘massive armada’: President Donald Trump amped up pressure on Iran on Wednesday,highlighting a “massive Armada” recently deployed to the region to force Tehran to the bargaining table over a deal that would end its nuclear weapons program. The president’s social media post is the latest show of force in the international arena for a White House emboldened by a successful military operation in Caracas, Venezuela. “It is a larger fleet, headed by the great Aircraft Carrier Abraham Lincoln, than that sent to Venezuela,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Like with Venezuela, it is ready, willing, and able to rapidly fulfill its mission, with speed and violence, if necessary.”

EU Parliament eyes US trade deal approval with Trump-proof safeguards: The European Parliament’s three largest political groups are discussing new safeguards against Trump in a bid to break a deadlock over approving the EU-U.S. trade deal, according to two lawmakers and three officials familiar with the talks. Center-left and liberal lawmakers are asking for a clause to be included in legislation currently before the house that would void the deal if Trump restarts his threats against the territorial sovereignty of Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark.

Poll: Trump voters support military intervention in more countries: President Donald Trump’s MAGA base, known for its aversion to U.S. involvement in foreign wars, has embraced the administration’s aggressive use of military force abroad and would strongly support more. A new POLITICO poll reveals 65 percent of Trump voters support the U.S. taking military action against at least one of several potential target countries, including Iran, Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, China and Mexico. And one stands out: Iran. About 50 percent of Trump voters backed military intervention in the country, the most of any foreign target. That number rose to 61 percent of respondents who described themselves as “MAGA Republican” Trump supporters.

Rubio walks NATO tightrope after Trump’s Greenland gambit: Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to do two things at once in testimony to senators Wednesday: take the temperature down after Trump rattled NATO by seeking to acquire Greenland, and deliver Trump’s message that the alliance must change. Rubio’s tightrope walk was on display at a sometimes-testy Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, where senators pressed him to repair frayed ties with Denmark and other allies. The moment underscored how Rubio — sometimes seen as the most pro-European of Trump’s top team — balances the administration’s America First views.

The amount, in Swiss francs (€33billion), that Switzerland’s Federal Council plans to spend to strengthen security and defense capabilities “in view of the deteriorating geopolitical situation.” The government announced today that Switzerland will raise its value-added tax rate for a decade to boost defense spending.

The U.S. may lead the world in artificial intelligence at the moment, but critics question whether the Trump administration may have just handed China a major advantage in the AI race.

In December, the U.S. relaxed export controls on powerful AI chips, allowing tech giant Nvidia to sell its H200 chips to China — America’s stiffest competition in the AI boom. While the U.S. will collect 25 percent of the sales revenue, the move could also turbocharge China’s AI industry. Advanced chips are the “missing piece to [China’s] AI puzzle,” said Janet Egan, a senior research fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. And with that piece in hand, Egan said, China is now poised to thwart America’s AI dominance.

To understand the national security issues surrounding the sale of advanced chips to China, Forecast caught up with Egan, who studies the national security risks of AI systems.

Trump’s decision to allow Nvidia to sell its second-most-powerful chip to China runs counter to years of policy designed to slow China’s technological advancement. What’s the logic driving this decision?

To try and steelman the other side, I think the argument is that we can slow China’s indigenization by increasing demand for U.S. chips, rather than domestically manufactured Chinese chips. And it means that every additional dollar of money spent on chips is flowing into U.S. companies, not Chinese companies. There’s also been some narrative of hooking companies on the U.S. tech stack — that these chips are addictive, and that once people start using them, they won’t use others.

But I really disagree with those three points. If we look at China’s history with semiconductors, for over a decade now, they’ve been investing massive amounts of funding, both at the national and state level … Injecting more chips into the ecosystem won’t actually reduce demand and reduce incentives for China to indigenize the ecosystem.

The argument about additional revenue going to U.S. companies — this is, I think, the strongest point that has been made to Trump. Private sector companies are rightfully acting in private-sector interests. But I think it’s important to pass through and say, “Look, no, that’s a private sector narrative. The national interest isn’t there.”

These new export policies do have safeguard provisions in place, like blocking prohibited end users — such as military-linked entities — from accessing the chips. But how likely are these safeguards to hold? What’s to stop the Chinese military from gaining access anyways?

It seems virtually impossible to enforce most of these safeguards. Once you export a chip to China, it’s very hard to tell the Chinese entity that has imported that chip what they can and can’t do with that chip — who they can give it to, who they can rent it to.

Particularly with AI, we’re seeing this growing fusion of private sector and government uses because it’s such a dual-use technology. We see this in the U.S., with the massive Pentagon contracts rolling out to a number of leading AI companies. In China as well, we see even small AI firms doing a lot of business with the People’s Liberation Army. We also need to accept that China has this civil-military fusion strategy, which essentially removes any clear distinction between private sector interests and military interests.

What’s the worst-case scenario for the U.S. here?

We equip China to compete at the very frontier of AI with us. At the moment there’s a gap, and that gap means that the U.S. is the best in the world at AI models. But if we give China the one missing piece to their AI puzzle, that’s just bad for national security.

Several recent reports assert that Chinese customs officials blocked shipments of the H200 chips, and Chinese tech firms were warned by government officials not to buy the chips unless it was necessary. What’s going on here?

Different people in the Chinese government have very different perspectives on AI progress and timelines. If you come from the perspective that transformative AI is a long way away, you might be willing to say, “Look, we’ll take the hit now and just keep prioritizing our own indigenous investment in our supply chains.”

The second issue here is it must be very hard for national champions like Huawei and SMIC to tell the Chinese government that they are that far behind where U.S. companies are. These companies have gotten massive investments from the Chinese government, massive sources of public funding, massive support. There’s probably a little lack of clarity around where Chinese progress is up to.

And the third is, we’ve seen this tactic with China before: increasing the ambiguity of the rules when they want to have the flexibility to ramp up and ramp down as they see fit.