Democrats are trying to make “TACO” — or “Trump always chickens out”— a new political slogan to get under the president’s skin. But it is not as clever a quip as they think it is, and it creates a perverse incentive for Trump to push the red buttons they don’t want him to push.
Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong coined the term “TACO” trade last month to describe how the president, in the face of market pressure, constantly backs off the biggest tariffs he slaps on other countries. But the term really took off last week after Trump responded angrily to a question from a reporter about what he thought of the term. “Don’t ever say what you said,” he warned the reporter, after a rambling explanation of why he believes he does not, in fact, chicken out. “That’s a nasty question. To me, that’s the nastiest question.”
It is straightforwardly wrongheaded as a political slogan.
Since then Democratic lawmakers and staffers have been trying to make TACO a thing. The Democratic National Committee handed out free tacos from a truck emblazoned with the term and an image of Trump in a chicken suit near the Republican National Committee’s headquarters in Washington this week. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., posted a photo of an unappetizing taco lunch on BlueSky and wrote, “It’s TACO Tuesday on Capitol Hill! I hear the White House celebrates every day.” And in a foolishly hawkish spin on the quip, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer recently condemned “TACO Trump” for negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran after his tough talk toward the country.
TACO has its merits as an analytic lens — it’s broadly true that Trump has backed down from many tariffs in response to pressure from corporate America and the markets. And it’s not hard to see why it’s tempting to pounce on any opportunity to needle Trump with a put-down that appears to bruise his ego. Think about the instant virality of the “weird” insult in the summer of 2024. But Democrats would do better to drop this one as a major talking point.
First, TACO is not entirely accurate. Even with Trump backing off his biggest tariffs, he is still maintaining hugely consequential 10% baseline tariffs on imports from every country around the world and far larger tariffs on specific industries such as steel and aluminum, and specific countries including China, Canada and Mexico. Even after Trump’s “chickening out,” his tariffs are creating an extraordinarily volatile business and investment climate, pushing us toward higher prices and generating conditions for a potentially severe downturn in economic growth. Democrats ought not to obscure that as the economy stands on the brink.
Second, it is straightforwardly wrongheaded as a political slogan. Why on Earth would Democrats dare Trump to follow through on his most extreme tariff threats? If this slogan were to really work, if it really did burrow its way into the deepest parts of Trump’s brain, then it would nudge him and his allies to cling more tightly to the most extreme versions of Trump’s bad economic policies. We’ve been fortunate to have been spared from such extremes — so far. But trade negotiations are still ongoing, and goading him to ignore potentially economy-saving pressure campaigns is foolish.
Consider how Armstrong, the columnist who coined TACO, reflected on the explosion of the term in a recent podcast episode: Let us state clearly, chickening out is good and something to be celebrated. Bad policy chickening out, hooray. So this is an unintended consequences thing if, as I think is quite unlikely by the way, given that I am an unimportant person and the president is an important person, if this gets into his head and he digs in his heels about some of this stuff. That is really a disaster for which I am very, very sorry. That the Democrats appear to be playing chicken with Trump and seeing who will blink first is not particularly mature, and seems to make a mockery of the stakes before us. Third, TACO threatens to undermine Democrats’ messaging that Trump poses an existential threat to democracy. If Trump really is, as Democrats say, an aspiring autocrat willing to shred the Constitution through his assault on the freedoms of civil society, it’s a bit odd to simultaneously argue that Trump is all talk and no action. As we all know, Trump often does the opposite of chicken out: He’s not holding back in his promises to pursue an aggressive mass deportation regime, he’s doggedly pursuing a bill that will gift the rich with favorable tax codes and throw millions off of their health insurance, and he’s trying to quash freedom of expression. It’s tonally awkward to point to all these things as perilous and at the same time call the man a coward who doesn’t follow through. Is Trump chaotic and bad at executing policy? Yes. But he does try — and succeed — at getting some consequential stuff done. Dems shouldn’t be encouraging him to do more of it — or casting the decline of a republic as a game. On top of all that: TACO just sounds corny.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
