Wall Street has a new shorthand about President Donald Trump — and he’s not happy about it.
Traders have reportedly come up with the acronym TACO, which stands for “Trump always chickens out,” to take advantage of the trade environment created by the president’s habit of threatening to impose tariffs on countries, and then backing off at the last moment.
He bristled when asked about it Wednesday in an Oval Office press conference.
“Don’t ever say what you say, that’s a nasty question,” Trump told a journalist who asked for his response to the acronym. “To me that’s the nastiest question.”
Trump rejected the idea that his reversals on tariffs amounted to him backing down, saying that usually receives a different critique.
“They will say oh he was chicken, he was chicken, that’s so unbelievable,” Trump said about the EU tariff extension, adding, “I usually have the opposite problem — they say you’re too tough!”
The “TACO” trades, first coined by the Financial Times, are one of the ways Wall Street has managed to profit from the chaos of the Trump administration.
Just a week after “Liberation Day,” in which he announced sweeping global tariffs, Trump abruptly announced they would all be cut down to a baseline 10 percent. His whopping 145 percent “retaliatory” tariff against China, part of a tit-for-tat escalation that has calmed after both countries struck a deal, is now down to 10 percent.
And just last week, Trump announced that he was considering increasing a tariff for the European Union to 50 percent, only to reverse course days later by extending the tariff deadline into July.