Trump officially hates Wall Street’s ‘TACO’ codename – which only makes it funnier
‘TACO’ is doing the rounds on Wall Street (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
'TACO' is doing the rounds on Wall Street (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
A new acronym, “TACO”, has allegedly popped up on Wall Street to describe US president Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff threats and he is – unsurprisingly – not happy about it.
Seemingly coined by journalist Robert Armstrong in a 2 May column for the Financial Times in response to the Republican leader’s habit of reversing his controversial tariffs, the acronym TACO stands for: “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
The term describes Trump’s pattern of threatening to impose high tariffs on countries and then backing out at the final moment or lowering the rate of the tariff. The pattern sends the market crashing following the threats, it then rebounds when the threats are lifted.
In early May, Trump he delayed his 50 per cent tariff on goods from the European Union and froze his 145 per cent tariffs on Chinese goods.
Trump Always Chickens Out
“[T]he recent rally has a lot to do with markets realizing that the U.S. administration does not have a very high tolerance for market and economic pressure, and will be quick to back off when tariffs cause pain. This is the TACO theory: Trump Always Chickens Out,” Armstrong wrote in his column.
On Wednesday (28 May) a reporter from CNBC asked about the term at the White House and in response Trump belligerently labelled it a “nasty question”.
“I chicken out? I’ve never heard that. You mean because I reduced China from 145 per cent that I set, down to 100, and then down to another number,” Trump responded.
He continued: “You call that chickening out? It’s called negotiation. They wouldn’t be over here today negotiating if I didn’t put a 50% tariff” on Europe.
“[T]hey’ll say, oh, he was chicken. He was chicken. That’s unbelievable. I usually have the opposite problem. They say, ‘You’re too tough, Mr. President.'”
Trump also said in the rant at the reporter: “Because we have $14 trillion now invested, committed to investing when Biden didn’t have practically anything. This country was dying. We have the hottest country anywhere in the world.
“Six months ago, this country was stone-cold dead.”
“Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question,” he concluded. “To me, that’s the nastiest question!”
