SEOUL — I arrived at my health checkup on Wednesday morning with a list of questions. It turned out my doctor, who knows I’m an American journalist, had a question too: “What is the Korean translation for ‘chicken out’ — as in ‘Trump always chickens out’?”
Hours earlier, President Donald Trump had declared a two-week ceasefire with Iran, a sharp pivot just ahead of his deadline to wipe out “a whole civilization” if Iran did not open the Strait of Hormuz. The news came during our morning in South Korea, where headlines carried the acronym “TACO” to recap a whirlwind day in U.S. diplomacy that unfolded while we were sleeping.
Around the world, non-English news outlets did the same — often finding creative ways to translate the phrase “chicken out” for news consumers like my doctor who are more familiar with the actual egg-laying bird than the proverbial presidential clucker in chief, and to explain that the acronym has no relation at all to Mexican food.
In Japan, TACO was introduced in news headlines last year during Trump’s repeated tariff announcements and reversals. At the time, it was a new English slang term spreading in the financial services industry for buying stocks cheap after a U.S. tariff announcement drove the markets lower, then selling for a profit after shares inevitably rebounded from a Trump reversal.
This week, the word was back in the news, with commentators discussing the difference between TACO and “tako,” which means “octopus” in Japanese. A news segment on Fuji Television explained to viewers the origin, meaning and connotation of the acronym with the fastidiousness of an educational program.
“T-A-C-O,” a newscaster spelled out, before enunciating: “TACO.”
“Tako? An octopus?” another asked, mimicking the tentacles of an octopus with his arms.
“Among friends, you might say, ‘Don’t chicken out,’ but it doesn’t feel like appropriate slang to use for a president,” a third commentator said, noting the element of scornful criticism in the English meaning.
The term became so widely used this week on social media and in news coverage that shortly after the ceasefire announcement, a popular illustrator, Irasutoya, released what appeared to be two new Trump drawings: one with the president wearing a taco (of the Mexican cuisine variety) as a hat, and another of him wearing an octopus on his head. One Japanese economist invented a new linguistic format: “TACO-ru,” using a Japanese conjugation to turn the acronym into a verb, meaning, “to TACO.”
いらすとや、トランプ大統領を巡るネットミーム「TACO」をイラスト化https://t.co/Q1wdCoy0Io “TACO”とは「Trump Always Chickens Out（トランプはいつも尻込みする）」の頭文字をとったもの。現在SNS上で、イランを巡る米政府の急な方針転換が「TACO」と言及されています。 pic.twitter.com/meTOpYDt9q
— KAI-YOU（カイユウ） (@KAI_YOU_ed) April 8, 2026
In the French press, TACO has turned into “Trump always deflates,” while in Italy, some of the national papers used an Italian turn of phrase that translates roughly into “always wets himself” — pejorative takes implying fearfulness.
In the Arab world, several media outlets have published explainers on the acronym, largely translating it as “Trump always backs down.”
A Spanish television segment described it as “doing the chicken,” while showing an illustration of Trump carrying a chicken.
As the term gained popularity last year, a Mexican news outlet made sure to distinguish that when it came to “Mister Taco,” it was not referring to the food but to Mr. President.
South Korea’s version of Wikipedia, Namuwiki, has an entire entry dedicated to TACO, complete with AI-generated photos of Trump dressed in a chicken suit. It translates the phrase as: “Trump always gets scared and runs away.”
The term originated last year in a Financial Times column describing the “Taco trade” among investors making sense of the quick fall and rise in the markets in response to Trump’s tariff announcements.
Trump has bristled at the term, and the White House and some Trump supporters describe his approach more generously as strategic unpredictability.
The use of the term to describe Trump’s change of mind on Iran has drawn criticism even from some Democrats, noting that a decision to spare the lives of 90 million Iranians shouldn’t be minimized to a meme.
But in many countries, TACO has become a shorthand to make sense of the president’s extreme threats that reverberate around the world — from tariffs to military attacks — and a TACO moment can have severe repercussions for the global economy. In oil-dependent Asia, for example, the prolonged Middle East war has resulted in economic tumult and a supply chain crisis comparable to the coronavirus pandemic.
In China, where the term “chicken out” does not exist in Mandarin and the taco remains an exotic dish in many parts of the country, state outlets and social media users have come up with various ideas to make the TACO meme more accessible. Chinese state broadcaster CCTV uses the phrase “back down at the last second” as its translation.
Some commentators are harking back to the term “paper tiger,” an old proverb that Mao Zedong popularized in his description of American imperialism — someone that appears powerful but is weak when challenged.
Others compare TACO to stalled “rotten-tail” property projects, a notorious problem of abandoned construction projects in China’s housing bubble that create legal and logistical headaches for property buyers left in a limbo. On TikTok sister site Douyin, at least one user proposed using the transliteration “Takou,” literally a “mouth/verbal flop” — a faux pas, something you shouldn’t say or you’d regret.
A viral meme compared Trump’s claims of an imminent victory over Iran to e-commerce giant Pinduoduo’s gamified marketing stunt in which users are encouraged to invest a lot of time trying to clinch unattainable rewards. Another shows Trump casting a TACO spell — with firepower emanating from his hands — in a game of cards as a last resort for salvaging the stock market.
Zhang Jiaqian, a meticulous translator of Trump’s social media posts, said he has not yet seen a perfect Chinese translation of TACO but shared his own view that the behavior characterized by TACO is not necessarily a sign of weakness but a scheme to maximize gains — in this case, squashing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
“We can laugh at TACO all we can want,” Zhang said, “but shouldn’t underestimate what his threats achieved.”
Chie Tanaka in Tokyo, Lyric Li in Seoul, Samantha Schmidt in Mexico City and Ellen Francis in Brussels contributed to this report.
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