Trump Always Chickens Out

Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO), also known as the TACO Trade, is an acronym that gained prominence in May 2025 after many threats and reversals during the trade war Donald Trump initiated with his administration's "Liberation Day" tariffs.
The acronym is used to describe Trump's tendency to make tariff threats, only to later delay them as a way to increase time for negotiations and for markets to rebound.

Origins

The term was first used by ''Financial Times'' journalist Robert Armstrong in a May 2, 2025 opinion piece that discussed tariffs and their effects on the US markets. In the piece, part of a series titled "Unhedged", Armstrong said that markets were realizing that "the US administration does not have a very high tolerance for market and economic pressure, and will be quick to back off when tariffs cause pain". Armstrong called this "the Taco theory: Trump Always Chickens Out".

Background

Before the emergence of the TACO acronym, Trump's tendency to change his mind on policy positions had been described since his first presidential campaign, using terms such as backtrack, reversal, and flip-flop, among others, and also on specific matters like immigration, or trade.

This tendency continues to be reported after TACO became popular, regarding aspects of Trump's second presidency, like trade, immigration, or international relationships.

Examples

Tariffs

Katie Martin of the ''Financial Times'' gave three recent examples of "the Taco factor" where Trump had reversed a decision in response to the market's reaction: Trump setting high "Liberation Day tariffs" and pausing them a week later, his calling for the termination of Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell before distancing himself from the idea, and the US committing to roll back tariffs against China during trade talks in May. Another example is when Trump would delay his 50% tariff proposal affecting EU imports to July 9, this would later cause European markets to rally.

Shannon Pettypiece of NBC News presented ten examples of Trump backtracking on tariffs he had announced or imposed: European Union tariffs, tariff on wine, Canada and Mexico tariffs, tariff on films, reciprocal tariffs, China tariffs, tariff on iPhones, Colombia tariffs, Tariff on dolls, and auto tariffs.

On June 11, 2025, Trump posted on Truth Social that he had reached a deal in the US's trade war with China. ABC News noted that a Chinese spokesperson said it was a "framework" to consolidate the agreements reached in May, and that the talks represented the "first meeting". Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick referred to the agreement as a "handshake for a framework". ''The Wall Street Journal'' published an editorial criticizing the deal, calling it a "truce that tilts in China's direction" by appearing to be "resetting their trade relationship to where it was a few months ago before a tit-for-tat escalation". Fareed Zakaria of the ''The Washington Post'' saw the vague trade deal as an example of "TACO", except for "one twist", that Americans "will still pay a tariff rate of 55 percent on goods from China (compared to China's 10 percent tariff on American goods)". On July 8, 2025, Trump again announced a delay in implementing tariffs against 14 countries, pushing back the deadline for negotiations from July 9 to August 1.

Foreign relations

Gideon Rachman of the ''Financial Times'' wrote that "Trump always chickens out on foreign policy too," citing a paper by Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council on Foreign Relations that found that Trump had threatened the use of force against foreign adversaries on 22 occasions (as of early 2025), but actually did so on only two occasions. For example, during his first term, Trump threatened "fire and fury" against North Korea and threatened to wipe Afghanistan "off the face of the earth" within 10 days; Trump followed through in neither case, instead entering failed negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear program and entering into an agreement for a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan without any meaningful concessions from the Taliban in return.

Reactions

In politics and economy

Donald Trump was asked by Megan Cassella, a CNBC Correspondent, what he thought about the term on May 28, 2025, during a swearing-in ceremony for the acting attorney general. He denied the behavior, saying "it's called negotiation". He called the question a "nasty question", adding "I usually have the opposite problem. They say I am too tough". According to CNN, Trump had not yet heard the term, and he first understood that Cassella was calling him a chicken.

Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out Trump's policies and actions that, in his opinion, will be reversed by the courts, but which, together with the reversals Trump himself has done, characterize him as an ineffective president since everybody is increasingly aware that he will back down, giving rise to the acronym TACO, while the tariffs war keeps hurting American businesses. ''The New York Times'' quoted analysts Salomon Fiedler of Berenberg Bank, Paul Donovan of UBS Wealth Management, and Chris Beauchamp of IG Group, saying that Trump's tariff threats don't last.

On May 28, 2025, the United States Court of International Trade (CIT) ruled that Trump had overreached his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and vacated all tariffs related to it. This prompted California Governor Gavin Newsom to comment, "It's raining tacos today." Reuters published a note about acronyms popular among investors four months into Trump's second term: YOLO, TACO, MEGA, MAGA (Make America Go Away), and FAFO. When reached for comment, White House spokesman Kush Desai said in an email, "these asinine acronyms convey how unserious analysts have consistently beclowned themselves by mocking President Trump and his agenda that've already delivered multiple expectation-beating jobs and inflation reports, trillions in investment commitments, a historic UK trade agreement, and rising consumer confidence."

In an interview with Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC on May 30, economist Justin Wolfers coined additional acronyms about Trump's actions themed on Mexican food: Burrito – the "Blatantly Unconstitutional Rewriting of the Rules of International Trade, Obviously". He said that the correct response would be to invoke Churro – the "Courts Have Ultimate Responsibility to Restore Order"

David A. Graham, writing for ''The Atlantic'', recalled his own 2018 analysis of Trump's "pattern of nearly always folding" on international politics during his first term, pointing out that Wall Street is just "catching on," and given that now Trump knows about the TACO trade expression it could mean that he may make bad choices and persist on them, causing the markets to tank. In an interview for Reuters, in the context of Trump's May 30 announcement of increased tariffs on steel and aluminum, Joachim Klement, head of strategy at the investment bank Panmure Liberum said, "We think that, unfortunately, as the so-called TACO trade becomes more viral, it becomes more likely that Trump will stick to higher tariffs just to prove a point."

On June 3, 2025, a Tuesday, the Democratic National Committee parked a rented taco truck, customized with images of Trump wearing a chicken costume, outside the Republican National Committee headquarters, and distributed free tacos to passers-by "as an effective way to draw attention to Trump's tariff policies, which they described as "playing games with working families’ livelihoods." Vice President JD Vance criticised the opposition party as "lame," to which the DNC answered calling him "the cringiest VP in American history," and mentioning that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is likely to "take away food from people."

Zeeshan Aleem, writing for MSNBC, criticised Democrats using TACO as a political slogan because it is inexact, as Trump was (as of June 2025) maintaining both baseline and specific tariffs. Also, because "Why on Earth would Democrats dare Trump to ''follow through'' on his most extreme tariff threats?" Aleem quotes Robert Armstrong lamenting the impact of his creation: "Let us state clearly, chickening out is good and something to be celebrated. Bad policy chickening out, hooray." Finally, because if the Democrats' message is that Trump is a threat to democracy, "it’s a bit odd to simultaneously argue that Trump is all talk and no action."

In the media

Almost immediately after Trump's response the term started a trend of memes about Trump referencing the TACO acronym or the phrase directly. The memes often employed generative AI to produce artificial images and video of Trump in situations parodying the viral term. Editorial cartoons parodied Trump's reaction to the term, frequently utilizing puns and exaggerated caricatures of Putin and Trump.

The term has been widely reported in the international press, with the phrase translated into Estonian (), French (), German (), Norwegian (), Slovene (), Spanish (), Brazilian Portuguese (), and other languages.

''The View'' hosts Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar and Ana Navarro praised the TACO phrase on their show. Navarro's analysis and discussion of the nickname with other cohosts included why they suspected the name gained traction and what led to the name's popularity, stating "For a nickname to be effective, there’s got to be truth to it, which this has: His trade policy is all over the place ..And it’s got to get under the person’s skin, which it clearly did". Host Sara Haines noted Trump's common use of insulting nicknames for public figures he dislikes. Navarro also likened the trending nickname to "karma" for Trump's previous actions relating to Mexico in the beginning of his second term, including banning the Associated Press from White House press events due to their refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America".

See also

* China's final warning – A joke of similar vein in Soviet and now popular Russian discourse poking fun at incessant "final" threats which never come to fruition.
*False or misleading statements by Donald Trump – Information about other contexts in which Trump has set and broken deadlines, that have also influenced the TACO acronym.

References

{{Second presidency of Donald Trump
Second presidency of Donald Trump
Political terminology of the United States
Internet memes introduced in 2025
2025 neologisms