Featured Image Credit: NBC
Topics: US Food, News, Social Media
Rachael Davis
Tacos have unfairly built up a reputation for giving you a funny stomach. TikTok is awash with memes about one famous taco chain in particular, namely in that it might give you a case of diarrhoea.
For President Donald Trump, a taco of a sort triggered a case of verbal diarrhoea in a press conference where a reporter asked him about a Wall Street trend.
We're two months in from ‘Liberation Day’ in which Trump announced sweeping tariff plans affecting the vast majority of America’s trading partners. What’s followed has been a series of walk-backs, with Trump repeatedly delaying exorbitant tariff plans against the likes of China and the EU. The resultant chaos in the markets gas starting to fall into a bust and boom pattern.
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Wall Street traders have picked up on this pattern, nicknaming it ‘TACO’ – an abbreviation for ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’.
Now, we all know that Trump has a bigly ego, and much like Marty McFly there’s something about being called a chicken that really incenses the US President.
When asked about the Wall Street phenomenon, Trump fell into a rambling tirade about the ‘nasty question’, claiming his tariff threats have yielded successful ‘negotiation’.
“Because we have $14 trillion now invested, committed to investing when Biden didn’t have practically anything,” he said, never failing to take an uncorroborated swipe at his predecessor. “This country was dying. We have the hottest country anywhere in the world... Six months ago, this country was stone-cold dead.”
Rather than directing his ire at the traders who are supposedly using the TACO acronym, he spat feathers at the reporter who asked about it. “Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question,” he seethed. “To me, that’s the nastiest question!”
Indeed, X users have labelled it a 'meltdown', with one sharing a frankly hilarious video of the leader of the free world dancing with some people dressed in chicken costumes.
The tirade, littered with unfounded claims as Trump’s press conferences often are, won’t have cowed any Wall Street traders who continue to see his tariff back-downs as opportunities to make trading wins.
After global markets soared on Monday, with the US’s rising in kind when they reopened after Memorial Day, Chris Beauchamp at IG Group told the New York Times: “TACO trade triumphs once again.”
Paul Note, a Murphy and Sylvest senior wealth adviser, told The New York Post: “He’s like the poker player at the table that you know is making some bets and then when pressed by the other players at the table, he folds.”
Unfortunately for traders, the US tariff landscape may be about to change dramatically. On Thursday 28th 2025, a federal US trade court placed a block on Trump’s tariff proposals, stating that his plans ‘exceed any authority granted to the president…to regulate importation by means of tariffs’.
Sadly, it’s unlikely that President Trump will be heading to Taco Bell to drown his sorrows.