Trying to predict Donald Trump's economic policy decisions from one moment to the next is a fool's errand.
The president sees paying other countries for goods and then receiving those goods as a sucker's deal and granting him the power to make unilateral decisions on U.S. trade has roiled the markets over the last few months. Seeking some serenity with the dealmaker-in-chief upending decades-long understandings and agreements, Wall Street has found its zen in a truism: Trump will always back down before anything too horrible happens.
This maxim has been abbreviated to TACO, which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. It's a market-oriented spin on the Zoomer-beloved "Nothing ever happens" meme and one that Trump was blissfully unaware of before Wednesday. While taking questions from reporters, Trump was pressed on the idea that all his monetary sabre-rattling leads to nothing.
Trump took offense at the term, calling the question "nasty" and saying he's merely working through the art of the deal. Where others might see Trump balking from his initial global tariff regime, the president said he's merely coming in with a strong starting position and working toward something more realistic.
“I’ve never heard that. You mean because I reduced China from 145 percent that I set down to 100, and then down to another number, and I said you have to open up your whole country?” Trump said. "You call that chickening out?"
"It's called negotiation, you set a number," he continued. "I set a ridiculous high number, and I go down a little bit."
Trump went on to say that the U.S. was a "dead country" before his tariff scheme, pushing the idea that former President Joe Biden was getting ripped off by the country's long-standing trade deficit.
The president has repeatedly pushed back the implementation date of his planned tariffs on important trading partners, citing trade deals in the works that rarely seem to materialize. Still, he bristled at the idea that he would ever back down from his stated goals.
"Don't ever say what you said," he admonished reporters.
Shares