A useful rule, when trying to understand current affairs, is AAL: Acronyms Always Lie.
A case in point would be the acronym of the year so far: TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out). It means that Donald Trump is always bluffing and, when push finally comes to shove, he folds.
TACO has caught on since Liberation Day and the onset of Trump 2.0’s tariff agenda, and is now deployed again and again to describe the President’s latest ceasefire with Iran.
Over free trade, Greenland, and the Middle East, he’s shown himself to be a playground bully who loves to intimidate adversaries only to cave whenever the going gets tough.
Market analysts like to talk about “the TACO trade” – the idea being that, while the media pulls its hair out over the President’s latest antics, the smart money knows that he won’t actually upend the global financial system.
TACO delights NeverTrumpers because it so directly contradicts the President’s idea of himself as a bold and world-changing leader who makes the tough decisions others can’t stomach. Griff Jenkins, the Trump-boosting personality on Fox News, has come up with his own TACO antonym acronym: NACHO (Never Avoids Confronting Hard Obstacles).
The T for Trump is missing but Jenkins seems proud of himself for coming up with another Mexican food-based abbreviation. That’s the level we’re operating on.
While not as dumb as NACHO, TACO is still a stupid term that speaks to the idiocy of our times. Say what you want about Trump, but there is nothing chicken about him or his second administration. Overturning the global financial order, threatening to annex Greenland or bombing the Iranian regime to pieces may be mad, rash, foolish and wrong. But it isn’t cowardice.
A more accurate acronym, though not as catchy, might be TAOB: Trump Always Over-Bids. He takes the French revolutionary concept of surenchère and gives it a New York dealmaker twist – upping the ante to terrifyingly violent extent in order to settle on less extreme but still advantageous terms. Trump’s “madman” approach is now so well-known that the Iranians appear wise to it. That’s why Tehran called its military response “Operation Madman”: to fight crazy, go crazier.
Say what you want about Trump, but there is nothing chicken about him or his second administration
The world more broadly appears to have understood that while most world leaders play strategic chess, Trump prefers the more transactional game of poker.
But he doesn’t just advance his interests with rhetorical threats and nasty Truth Social posts. He deploys hard power, too, from Venezuela to Iran and elsewhere. So to suggest that, by not implementing his full range of tariffs, or not invading Nuuk, or not dropping a nuclear weapon on Tehran, Trump is somehow “chickening out” or “backing down” is to misunderstand his approach. It also trivializes the Iran situation, as if the current war can be easily retreated from when it clearly can’t.
As Vice President J.D. Vance prepares to negotiate a very difficult hand in Islamabad with Iranian officials this weekend, he may well think to himself: “If only TACO were true.” If only Trump had wimped out of launching the Iran war, the world might be in a better place. (Vance would never air those thoughts publicly, of course.)
Talk of “TACO trading” also implies that, while the bovine public might freak out about Trump’s antics, cooler financial heads understand the real game. But that is cope – another over-used word. It’s a deluded attempt to pretend that grown-ups still control the world and that the Gods of the Stock Market can steer America on to a more correct and stable course.
Yet what this war has shown, again, is that markets are anything but rational. Everybody can see that Trump’s social media posts are often timed specifically to influence Wall Street, and that he tends to initiate the most disruptive military missions late on Friday evenings when markets are closed for the weekend. Yet traders still seem to interpret the most desperately optimistic Trump outbursts about ceasefires as peace guarantees, and treat his clearly hyperbolic threats of mass destruction as wholly credible. NKA: in other words, Nobody Knows Anything.
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