‘TACO’ Is the Secret to Trump’s Resilience

Opinion|‘TACO’ Is the Secret to Trump’s Resilience

Judging by his reaction to a reporter’s question this week, Donald Trump doesn’t like it when you ask him about “TACO” — the reported Wall Street acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” an assumption that makes it safe to be in the market even when the president threatens Europe and China with intensifications of his trade war.

Even if he dislikes the barnyard-fowl comparison, though, the acronym gets at something that’s crucial to Trump’s political resilience. The willingness to swerve and backpedal and contradict himself is a big part of what keeps the president viable, and the promise of chickening out is part of Trump’s implicit pitch to swing voters — reassuring them that anything extreme is also provisional, that he’s always testing limits (on policy, on power) but also generally willing to pull back.

A case study: Just six weeks ago, I wrote a column describing the second Trump presidency as headed for political failure, while noting that a course correction was still possible.

That caveat was debatable, since Trump’s post-Liberation Day polling was starting to look like Joe Biden’s polling numbers after the botched Afghanistan withdrawal. Once Biden hit the low 40s in the RealClearPolitics average, he never again reached 45 percent approval: Some presidents just lose their mandate early and never get it back.

But since that column appeared, Trump has bobbed and wove away from his most extreme China tariffs, he has achieved some kind of separation from Elon Musk and he’s started complaining about the “crazy” Vladimir Putin while casting himself as the great would-be peacemaker of the Middle East. And lo and behold, his poll numbers have floated back up, not to genuine popularity but to a perfectly normal level for a president in a polarized country.

With a different president, you might say that this recovery happened in spite of the White House’s various backtracks and reversals (plus various rebukes from the judiciary). But with Trump it’s more apt to say that it’s happened because of these setbacks and recalibrations. Seeing Trump both check himself and be checked by others is what an important group of voters expect from his presidency. They like that Trump pressures institutions they distrust or dislike, from official Washington to elite universities, but their approval is contingent on a dynamic interaction, where he accepts counterpressure and retreats.