MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

TACO Trump furious with ‘nasty questions”

The Democratic National Committee parked a TACO truck outside the RNC headquarters in Washington, DC, on Tuesday

Wall Street 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.

 The US president bristled when asked about it on 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.”

“I chicken out? I’ve never heard that,” he said. “Don’t ever say what you said,” he told the reporter. “That’s a nasty question. 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.

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.

In effect just a few days after what he called “Liberation Day,” as part of his MAGA campaign, (Make America Big Again) in which he announced sweeping global tariffs, Trump abruptly announced they would all be cut down to a baseline 10%. Likewise his whopping 145% “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%.