"Trump Always Chickens Out" (TACO) is a pejorative description of the perceived tendency of United States president Donald Trump to make threats, only to later delay or renege on them as a way to increase time for negotiations, allow markets to rebound, and avert backlash. The phrase was popularized in May 2025 after the many threats and reversals during the trade war he initiated with his "Liberation Day" tariffs. On Wall Street, a TACO trade is buying stocks cheaply after a tariff announcement pushes stocks lower, then selling them at a profit after the tariffs are delayed or reduced and the market rebounds.
In 2025 and 2026, TACO was also used to describe Trump's statements threatening to annex Greenland, and his efforts to negotiate a last-minute ceasefire deal with Iran before his deadline for initiating an American bombing campaign.
Background
Trump's tendency to change stance on policy positions and even the competence of his own appointees (e.g. Federal Reserve governor Jerome Powell) had been reported since his first presidential campaign and administration. Before the emergence of the TACO acronym during Trump's second term in office, observers used terms such as backtrack and flip-flop. Wall Street traders called it the "Trump put" when, during his first term, he would change a policy if the markets reacted badly to it.
This tendency, by both Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, was reported in the lead up to, and during, Trump's second presidency, with commentators noting specific issues including trade, immigration, and international relations.
Origins "TACO trade" was first used by the Financial Times journalist Robert Armstrong in a May 2, 2025 opinion piece that discussed tariffs and their effects on the US markets. In the piece, part of a series titled "Unhedged", Armstrong said that markets were realizing that "the US administration does not have a very high tolerance for market and economic pressure, and will be quick to back off when tariffs cause pain". Armstrong called this "the Taco theory: Trump Always Chickens Out". TACO was a play on the Mexican food, alluding to Trump's obsession with securing the Mexico–United States border:
"Chickening out" is slang for being frightened and deciding against a planned course of action. The French press have used "Trump always deflates", and some Italian papers use an idiom that translates roughly as "always wets himself". Since the coinage of TACO, more abbreviations about the behaviors of Trump or of financial markets have been devised, such as "TUNA" ("Trump Usually Negates Announcements").
Examples
Tariffs Katie Martin of the Financial Times gave three examples of "the Taco factor" where Trump had reversed a decision in response to the market's reaction: Trump setting high "Liberation Day tariffs" and pausing them a week later, his calling for the termination of Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell before distancing himself from the idea, and the US committing to roll back tariffs against China during trade talks in May. Another example is when Trump would delay his 50% tariff proposal affecting EU imports to July 9; this would later cause European markets to rally.
Shannon Pettypiece of NBC News gave ten examples of Trump having "threatened, then backtracked on, tariffs" since taking office, saying that in her view Trump had threatened "far more" tariffs than he had imposed.
On June 11, 2025, Trump posted on Truth Social that he had reached a deal in the US's trade war with China. ABC News noted that a Chinese spokesperson said it was a "framework" to consolidate the agreements reached in May, and that the talks represented the "first meeting". Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick referred to the agreement as a "handshake for a framework". The Wall Street Journal published an editorial criticizing the deal, calling it a "truce that tilts in China's direction" by appearing to be "resetting their trade relationship to where it was a few months ago before a tit-for-tat escalation". Fareed Zakaria of The Washington Post saw the vague trade deal as an example of "TACO", except for "one twist", that Americans "will still pay a tariff rate of 55 percent on goods from China (compared to China's 10 percent tariff on American goods)".
On July 8, 2025, Trump again announced a delay in implementing tariffs against 14 countries, pushing back the deadline for negotiations from July 9 to August 1. Bloomberg reported that Trump has softened his hardline tone on China to ensure a summit with General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping, aiming to push for a trade agreement between America and China.
Foreign relations Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times wrote that "Trump always chickens out on foreign policy too", citing a paper by Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council on Foreign Relations that found that Trump had threatened the use of force against foreign adversaries on 22 occasions (as of early 2025), but actually did so on only two occasions. For example, during his first term, Trump threatened "fire and fury" against North Korea and threatened to wipe Afghanistan "off the face of the earth" within ten days; Trump followed through in neither case, instead attempting negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear program and entering into an agreement for a US withdrawal from Afghanistan without any meaningful concessions from the Taliban in return.
Trump threatened "extreme consequences" if Russia did not agree to a ceasefire by 8 August 2025. When the deadline came, Trump instead announced that he would host Putin in Alaska. The term was used to describe the outcome of the August 2025 summit in Alaska. Trump threatened to impose further sanctions on Russia if it did commit to ending its war against Ukraine. Putin ignored the warnings, and Trump did not follow through on them after the summit. Instead, Trump suggested that the onus was now on Ukraine to give up territory to end the war.
In January 2026, TACO was widely used to describe Trump's reversal of his threats to annex Greenland and impose tariffs on NATO allies who opposed him.
Following the 2026 Iran protests, after Trump threatened the Iranian leadership with military intervention, TACO was used by commentators to describe Trump's actions when they did not promptly materialize. Instead, the United States briefly pursued nuclear negotiations with Iran, before later launching strikes alongside Israel, which had started attacks on Iran during the course of those negotiations.
As the subsequent 2026 Iran war began to impact global oil and securities markets, analysts assessed that Trump's attempt to TACO out of the conflict might not have been feasible as Iran was unwilling to compromise, calling Trump's bluff. In April 2026, Trump issued a deadline, set for 8 April at 8:00 pm EDT, where he threatened to bomb all of Iran's power plants and bridges, if Iran did not agree to his demands. Two days before the deadline, Iran had proposed a ten-point peace plan which Trump had rejected and told reporters was "not good enough". However, about an hour and 20 minutes before the deadline was to expire, Trump backed away from his ultimatum and suspended planned strikes for two weeks as part of a ceasefire agreement, stating that Iran's ten-point peace proposal was a "workable" basis for further negotiations. Multiple events involving Trump following the ceasefire have also been pointed out as instances of "TACO". On 21 April, after having threatened to resume attacks if the US and Iran did not come to a full agreement to end the war, he unilaterally extended the ceasefire to indefinite time and claimed that he paused the attacks because Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir asked him to and also because the Iranian leadership was supposedly too divided. On 7 May, Trump paused Operation Project Freedom, an American military operation to guide merchant ships through Middle Eastern waters, after less than 48 hours. CNN recorded that between March and June 9, Trump had falsely claimed to be nearing an agreement with Iran to end the war at least 38 times.
"Not A Chance Hormuz Opens"
On April 29, 2026, Bloomberg columnist Javier Blas wrote on X that one trader told him of a variation on TACO that mocked Trump's involvement in the 2026 Iran war: the abbreviation "NACHO", or "Not A Chance Hormuz Opens". NACHO refers to the disruption of fuel shipping from the Strait of Hormuz, including 20% of all oil and natural gas maritime transit, by Iran in response to the US-Israeli attacks. The term also referenced Trump's inability to end the war exclusively on his own terms. Trump's execution of the conflict with Iran was criticized on April 29, when Trump said that the naval blockade could last several months. The 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis resulted in steep increases in global oil prices including those of the US, with fuel prices surging by 40% since February 2026. Increases in global energy prices and availability frustrated Trump, who claimed that Iran was "begging" for an end to the 2026 United States naval blockade of Iran, and threatened further strikes if the Strait of Hormuz were not to be reopened. Fox News had attempted, weeks prior, to establish its own version of the "NACHO" abbreviation, to counter the negative connotation of "TACO", called "Never Avoids Confronting Hard Obstacles", but the term failed to become popular. Responding to this acronym, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said, "are these the same geniuses who thought President Trump would never secure voluntary Most-Favored-Nations drug pricing deals or renegotiate broken trade deals?" International relations analyst Trita Parsi argued that Trump was desperate to maintain the ceasefire and obtain a favorable deal with Iranian leaders, to the point of denying ceasefire violations from Iran, but also kept seeking maximalist demands that undermined the talks. Trump officials and advisors confirmed to The Atlantic that Trump was growing "bored" of the war but was also frustrated at Iran's hardened stance, with the administration overall still being reluctant to restart the war.
Immigration
News media had also argued that Trump "chickens out" on immigration policy as well, particularly on policies regarding mass deportations. For instance, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents began raiding locations across the Californian city of Los Angeles to crack down on immigration, sparking public backlash there in the form of protests in June 2025. On June 12, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the immigration crackdown policy ended up hurting farmers by taking away workers. The same day, senior ICE official Tatum King wrote an order for an immediate pause on immigration raids on agricultural workplaces, restaurants, and hotels. On October the same year, in response to Trump's threats to arrest Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois governor JB Pritzker for "failing to protect" ICE officers on Truth Social, Pritzker dismissed the threats. He referred to Trump as "demented, literally; unhinged" and "insecure" but also being unable to execute his threats in practice, directly mentioning the "TACO" abbreviation. In January 2026, after anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, Minnesota which were sparked by surged ICE activity there as part of Operation Metro Surge and the killings of American citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents during the operation, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced a "constructive and productive conversation" between Trump and Minnesota governor Tim Walz and a potential withdrawal of federal agents in the city.
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