This TACO gives Trump indigestion, so watch out

Donald Trump relished his favorite versions of tacos during his first presidential term.

“The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill,” he tweeted in early 2016, sharing a photo of himself chowing down on a large serving at his desk. “I love Hispanics!”

These days, tacos aren’t Trump’s thing. More precisely, the version cooked up by a Financial Times columnist, Robert Armstrong, isn’t his thing.

Armstrong, noting that Trump has repeatedly backed away from some of his fiercest tariff threats, dubbed this phenomenon “TACO” — Trump Always Chickens Out. TACO-savvy traders were making money embracing that reality, Armstrong observed.

It's not a reality Trump is ready to embrace himself, though.

“That’s a nasty question,” he told a reporter who asked about the TACO moniker at a White House press briefing on Wednesday. “Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question. … To me, that’s the nastiest question.”

Trump, who fashions himself a brilliant dealmaker and strategist despite ample evidence to the contrary, is, of course, always going to bristle at the notion that he is a chicken — and a predictable one at that. He also routinely peddles himself as an infallible winner, so the nastiest question is also one that speculates about whether he’s mired in a losing streak. His tariff policy, unleashed on allies and competitors alike, has been rolled out on a seesaw and riddled with economically damaging ineptitude.

Trump will never acknowledge any of that, which is to be expected. But it also may be wise to consider this TACO-fueled moment as something other than a lighthearted interlude in an otherwise tragicomic policy miasma. Trump protects and prioritizes how his various audiences perceive him. A Trump eager to prove he’s not a chicken is a Trump willing to inflict economic, social or political damage in the service of his ego and self-image (also a recurring feature of his earlier but less consequential passage as a real estate developer and casino operator). Dangers loom.

Trump once told me that he admired John Gotti, the notorious mobster, because Gotti never backed down, never flinched or wept in a courtroom, and gave everyone who opposed him the evil eye. That’s how Trump sees himself. Anything but a chicken.

Recall that Trump campaigned on imposing suffocating tariffs on countries such as China, which he described as a predator fleecing US manufacturers and workers. He has had much the same to say of indispensable trading partners like Canada and Mexico, which have jointly created vast storehouses of economic value for themselves and the US. Determined to keep a campaign promise that endeared him to his political base, he offered the world a Rose Garden tariffs spectacle in April that caused financial markets to plunge.

Briefly chastened, Trump then set about offering carve-outs to various industries and playing down the scale of the tariffs he was considering. He eagerly courted countries to work out deals with him. Going too far down that path, though, would have been an obvious reversal of his reckless campaign pledges, and that might have cost him come next year’s midterm elections. So he took to being a human yo-yo when discussing his tariff intentions; sometimes tough, sometimes willing to bend, but always up-and-down and always unpredictable (and uncertainty, mind you, can readily morph into chaos).

A helpful escape from his predicament landed in Trump’s lap on Thursday, when the US Court of International Trade ruled that he lacked the legal authority to unilaterally impose tariffs under the presidency’s emergency powers provision. Trump could have acquiesced, rolled his tariff regime back into the Pandora’s box from which it sprang and then blamed it all on the courts. The Deep State undermined my brave tariffs stance, he could have told his voters, not me. But I tried to keep my promises to you. I really did.

Trump may have had fresh images of cowardly fowl dancing in his head when he ignored that opportunity, though he has had decades of institutional defiance that preceded the clucking. Regardless, he is now certainly determined to prove he’s not a chicken. His administration successfully appealed the trade ruling to a higher court on Thursday and won a temporary reprieve from its restrictions. While the US Court of Appeals provided only a stay and could ultimately affirm the trade court’s ruling, the White House celebrated. It trotted out trade hardliner and former prison inmate Peter Navarro to take a victory lap on Trump’s behalf on TV.

This tariff dispute is likely to find its way to the Supreme Court, where nine justices will decide, yet again, what the proper powers of the presidency are in an era when the Oval Office’s current occupant believes they are limitless. My colleagues Noah Feldman and Matt Levine have written thoughtful, and differing, analyses of the legal and constitutional principles being tested around the tariff battle.

How the Supreme Court might land amid all of this is unlikely to end the mess, however. The White House said Trump would find other ways to impose trading levies if the courts stop him this time around. And he’s newly incentivized to prove he’s owning the opposition.

“The sad thing is, now, when I make a deal with them — it’s something much more reasonable — they’ll say, ‘Oh, he was chicken. He was chicken,’ Trump said during Wednesday’s press conference. “That’s unbelievable.”

There’s certainly one person who doesn’t believe it, and he’s now determined to convince the rest of the world not to believe it, either. Fasten your seat belts.