Political Tribune

Donald Trump, Economy, Opinion, Politics

Someone Left POTUS A Message Outside Trump International Hotel

Some graffiti appeared outside of the Trump International Hotel this week.

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Wednesday was the day that “TACO” — the acronym “Trump Always Chickens Out” went mainstream.

A Financial Times columnist named Robert Armstrong coined the phrase earlier this month, referring to a trading strategy where traders could profit from the timing of Trump’s announcements and subsequent backtracks on new tariffs.

“The recent rally has a lot to do with markets 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,” the original FT piece by Armstrong said. “This is the Taco theory: Trump Always Chickens Out.”

Earlier in the day on Wednesday, several mainstream news outlets wrote about the term, especially after an analyst wrote about the trade and mostly endorsed it. It reached the point where a reporter asked Trump about it, prompting the president to dismiss the inquiry as a “nasty question” and deny that he had ever “chickened out” at any time.

Then, on Thursday, some “TACO” graffiti appeared outside of the Trump International Hotel at Columbus Circle in New York, as posted by the X account of the anti-Trump organization The Lincoln Project:

It’s not known who put the graffiti there. But there were some funny reactions to it:

Meanwhile, the entrance of “TACO” into the lexicon wasn’t the only bad news on Wednesday for Trump’s tariff policy.

The U.S. Court of International Trade ruled unanimously that Trump did not have the authority to impose his tariffs, in a ruling that applies to the “Liberation Day” tariffs as well as the individual ones announced on Canada, Mexico, and China.

“The question in the two cases before the court is whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (“IEEPA”) delegates these powers to the President in the form of authority to impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world,” the three-judge panel wrote, per Axios. “The court does not read IEEPA to confer such unbounded authority and sets aside the challenged tariffs imposed thereunder.”

Trump has already announced plans to appeal, and CNBC reported that the Administration may ask the Supreme Court to hear the case, possibly as soon as Friday.

Photo courtesy of X screenshot. 

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Stephen Silver

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Stephen Silver is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, and contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Stephen has authored thousands of articles that focus on politics, technology, and the economy.

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