The president is taking his new Wall Street nickname very personally.
Earlier this month, Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong coined an acronym to describe a popular new trading strategy centered around Donald Trump’s start-and-stop tariff policies: TACO, or “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
But when confronted with the reality of his new reputation during a White House press briefing Wednesday, Trump flipped out.
“I kick out?” Trump said initially, misunderstanding the acronym.
“Chicken out,” the reporter clarified.
“Oh isn’t that nice. ‘Chicken out,’ I’ve never heard that,” Trump said before ranting that he hadn’t lacked follow-through on his trade policies, referring to his arrangements with China and the European Union. Instead, Trump claimed that he had heard complaints he was too tough.
“You call that chickening out? Because we have $14 trillion now invested, committed to investing—when Biden didn’t have practically anything, Biden, this country was dying,” Trump said. “You know we have the hottest country anywhere in the world. I went to Saudi Arabia, the king told me, he said, ‘You’ve got the hottest count—we’ve got the hottest country in the world right now.’ Six months ago this country was stone cold dead. We had a dead country.”
“We had a country of people that didn’t think it was going to survive and you ask a nasty question like that,” Trump continued, apparently blaming the media for reporting on the talk of the town.
The Art of the Deal author then continued to rant about how he had gone high on his initial tariff proposals with the aim of keeping the final negotiation at a higher rate than previously accepted. (This has proven to not be the case. In the last month, several countries including South Korea and Japan have decided to follow China’s tariff negotiating strategy, gambling that public pressure from within the U.S. will force the Trump administration to fold on its unpopular trade policy before their own economies feel the sting.)
“Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question. To me that’s the nastiest question,” Trump scolded the reporter.
Reporter: Wall Street analysts have a new term called the TACO trade.. Saying Trump always chickens out on tariffs… Trump: I kick out?Reporter: Chicken out.Trump: I gave the E.U. a 50% tax tariff. They called up and said, please, let meet right now. You call that… pic.twitter.com/lPQK9iZ70d
— Acyn (@Acyn) May 28, 2025
In a Wednesday note obtained by Market Watch, Sevens Report Research founder Tom Essaye insisted that Trump does, in fact, always chicken out. So far, that’s been true for enacting additional tariffs on Mexico and Canada, postponing his “reciprocal” tariff plan on dozens of countries after his “Liberation Day” announcement went south, delaying a tariff on imports from the European Union, and smashing his plan to fine China, temporarily decreasing tariffs on Chinese products to 30 percent from 145 percent.
“So, the returns are somewhat conclusive: The TACO trade has worked and buying stocks on extreme tariff-related threats has worked,” Essaye wrote, noting that known gambit’s growing popularity will translate to diminished returns.
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