Trump is clearly in step 5 of his negotiating playbook, leaving the Iranians at the altar right when both sides were reportedly “inches away” from a deal in order to create maximum pressure. The problem is that both Iran and markets can see straight through it. Equities are barely down because nobody really believes he is willing to sustain maximum pressure indefinitely. Everyone understands what he is trying to do, but he has burned too much credibility for the threat to fully land. So instead of forcing a quick capitulation, he just turns the conflict into a slower war of attrition. Trump clearly sees equity prices as a resource he can spend. But if markets refuse to panic because they expect him to TACO and nobody wants to dump the panic low, then he never gets the market pain that would actually force him to bite the bullet and give Iran what it wants. At the same time, Iran is not backing down either because from their perspective this is existential. So you end up stuck in the worst possible middle: not enough credibility to force Iran to capitulate, not enough panic to force Trump to capitulate. That is where the molochian dynamic kicks in. This kind of half credible maximum pressure just traps both sides in a spiral of attrition where every missed off ramp makes the next one harder to take. The conflict keeps grinding forward until one side finally breaks, only after the damage is much worse and much harder to reverse than it needed to be. That is the cost of Trumpian policymaking when you get too cute with markets and start treating them as a metric to optimize instead of a signal to read. He tries to escape reality but all he is really doing is bottling up the pain until it comes back in a much uglier form.