We can’t all be Hawk Tuah Girl. Sometimes virality is more of a slow burn.
Such is the case with the great new Wall Street lingo that has burst forth well beyond the confines of the finance industry to enter the mainstream zeitgeist. Yes, I’m talking about the TACO trade.
Robert Armstrong, a columnist for the Financial Times, coined the TACO acronym in the May 2 edition of his newsletter. TACO, in this context, stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” Armstrong was originally using it to describe the phenomenon of President Donald Trump repeatedly announcing arbitrarily huge tariffs, then responding to the resulting market panic by delaying or easing the tariffs he just announced, with the end state always being a market recovery post-chickening out.
For a few weeks, the TACO buffet did not spread beyond finance dweebs on Twitter (or X for all you ketamine freaks out there peeing your pants from, let’s say, glee). However, when a New York Times headline described traders cashing in on the “TACO Trade” by buying into the market dip before the poultry in chief inevitably clucked his latest surrender, (forgive me) the chickens had really flown the coop.
Now the TACO concept is a genuine mainstream hit, to the point that a reporter asked Trump about his reaction to it. If you haven’t yet seen the video of CNBC correspondent Megan Cassella explaining TACO right to Trump’s face, go watch it quick, I’ll wait. He DOES NOT like being accused of chickening out.
Which leads me to suspect that the president did not get through the entire “Back to the Future” trilogy. Although this does not really come up in the first film given that it was shot prior to the moneymaking potential of sequels becoming apparent to the big studio execs, a central plot point of the second two movies is that Marty McFly has to learn not to fly off the handle every time someone calls him a “chicken,” lest he get into a life-ruining car wreck or wind up entombed in the Old West under his Clint Eastwood alter ego after being gunned down by a tobacco-stained Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen.
Alright, first of all, don’t email me complaining about the spoilers I just wrote concerning a movie franchise that concluded more than 30 years ago. Second, the thing is, just like Marty, President Trump is not actually a chicken. He is only concerned about being called or thought of as a chicken.
Now, take a second to disassociate from the instinctive revulsion you feel every time you hear Trump’s name. I know, I have to do it too, I’m swallowing a throatful of bile at this very moment. Trump is many things: a bigot, a liar, an adulterer, a fraud, a tax cheat, a dipshit — I could go on all day. One thing he actually is not, though, is a chicken.
The guy got up right after being shot at and pumped his fist in defiance. I don’t know if you’ve ever been shot at, but I have, and it’s scary. What he did is not a chicken’s reaction. Sure, he dodged the draft during Vietnam. Yet, his whole political persona requires a certain dark courage. Anyone who would say the largely unpopular, horrible things he says to the vast audience that he has must, by necessity, possess a sort of fearlessness.
Marty McFly wasn’t a chicken either. For crying out loud, he started a fistfight with a skater gang in the future even though Griff had that weird cybernetic arm enhancement thing!
No, Marty was no chicken. His problem was being overly worried about whether other people might think of him as a chicken. By the end of the series, he overcame this character flaw.
I don’t know that we will see the same type of personal growth from our 78-year-old president. Since backing down on the tariffs was actually the right move given that they were stupid in the first place, maybe that’s fine. The TACO terminology is good shorthand for what Trump has been doing. Those of us who can still think rationally can nonetheless see that the thing that most bothers him about it — being called a “chicken” — is not technically accurate as applied to his personality as a whole.
Still, perhaps the next time he’s thinking about slapping on a tariff that he’s just going to have to TACO his way out of, Trump could save himself some embarrassment and cock-a-doodle-don’t. He wouldn’t have to look weak, and we could all stop dealing with so much market whiplash. And if we have to forgo all the memes about TACO Tuesday, the TACO truck Democrats sent to serve free tacos outside the Republican National Committee’s headquarters, etc., well, that is a sacrifice we must be willing to make.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
The post Wall Street Infuriates The President With ‘TACO Trade’ Lingo, He Forgets Key Lesson Of ‘Back To The Future’ appeared first on Above the Law.
We can’t all be Hawk Tuah Girl. Sometimes virality is more of a slow burn.
Such is the case with the great new Wall Street lingo that has burst forth well beyond the confines of the finance industry to enter the mainstream zeitgeist. Yes, I’m talking about the TACO trade.
Robert Armstrong, a columnist for the Financial Times, coined the TACO acronym in the May 2 edition of his newsletter. TACO, in this context, stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” Armstrong was originally using it to describe the phenomenon of President Donald Trump repeatedly announcing arbitrarily huge tariffs, then responding to the resulting market panic by delaying or easing the tariffs he just announced, with the end state always being a market recovery post-chickening out.
For a few weeks, the TACO buffet did not spread beyond finance dweebs on Twitter (or X for all you ketamine freaks out there peeing your pants from, let’s say, glee). However, when a New York Times headline described traders cashing in on the “TACO Trade” by buying into the market dip before the poultry in chief inevitably clucked his latest surrender, (forgive me) the chickens had really flown the coop.
Now the TACO concept is a genuine mainstream hit, to the point that a reporter asked Trump about his reaction to it. If you haven’t yet seen the video of CNBC correspondent Megan Cassella explaining TACO right to Trump’s face, go watch it quick, I’ll wait. He DOES NOT like being accused of chickening out.
Which leads me to suspect that the president did not get through the entire “Back to the Future” trilogy. Although this does not really come up in the first film given that it was shot prior to the moneymaking potential of sequels becoming apparent to the big studio execs, a central plot point of the second two movies is that Marty McFly has to learn not to fly off the handle every time someone calls him a “chicken,” lest he get into a life-ruining car wreck or wind up entombed in the Old West under his Clint Eastwood alter ego after being gunned down by a tobacco-stained Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen.
Alright, first of all, don’t email me complaining about the spoilers I just wrote concerning a movie franchise that concluded more than 30 years ago. Second, the thing is, just like Marty, President Trump is not actually a chicken. He is only concerned about being called or thought of as a chicken.
Now, take a second to disassociate from the instinctive revulsion you feel every time you hear Trump’s name. I know, I have to do it too, I’m swallowing a throatful of bile at this very moment. Trump is many things: a bigot, a liar, an adulterer, a fraud, a tax cheat, a dipshit — I could go on all day. One thing he actually is not, though, is a chicken.
The guy got up right after being shot at and pumped his fist in defiance. I don’t know if you’ve ever been shot at, but I have, and it’s scary. What he did is not a chicken’s reaction. Sure, he dodged the draft during Vietnam. Yet, his whole political persona requires a certain dark courage. Anyone who would say the largely unpopular, horrible things he says to the vast audience that he has must, by necessity, possess a sort of fearlessness.
Marty McFly wasn’t a chicken either. For crying out loud, he started a fistfight with a skater gang in the future even though Griff had that weird cybernetic arm enhancement thing!
No, Marty was no chicken. His problem was being overly worried about whether other people might think of him as a chicken. By the end of the series, he overcame this character flaw.
I don’t know that we will see the same type of personal growth from our 78-year-old president. Since backing down on the tariffs was actually the right move given that they were stupid in the first place, maybe that’s fine. The TACO terminology is good shorthand for what Trump has been doing. Those of us who can still think rationally can nonetheless see that the thing that most bothers him about it — being called a “chicken” — is not technically accurate as applied to his personality as a whole.
Still, perhaps the next time he’s thinking about slapping on a tariff that he’s just going to have to TACO his way out of, Trump could save himself some embarrassment and cock-a-doodle-don’t. He wouldn’t have to look weak, and we could all stop dealing with so much market whiplash. And if we have to forgo all the memes about TACO Tuesday, the TACO truck Democrats sent to serve free tacos outside the Republican National Committee’s headquarters, etc., well, that is a sacrifice we must be willing to make.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].
