Source: Andrew Harnik / Getty
angry response to a description of his erratic trade policies evoked a bevy of laughs from social media.
On
Wednesday (May 28), President Donald Trump had
sworn in former Fox News host Jeannine Pirro as the interim U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C. in the White House, and began to field questions from reporters. CNBC reporter Megan Casella asked, “Mr. President, Wall Street analysts have coined a new term called the TACO trade. They’re saying Trump always chickens out on your tariff threats and that’s why markets are higher this week. What’s your response to that?”
“I’ve never heard that,” Trump acknowledged, but swiftly got defensive. “You mean because I reduced
China from 145%, that I set down to 100% and then down to another number, and I said, ‘You have to open up your whole country.’ And because, I gave the European Union a 50% tax tariff, and they called up, and they said, ‘Please, let’s meet right now. Please, let’s meet right now.’” He continued angrily, “after I did what I did, they said, ‘We’ll meet anytime you want.'” And we have an end date of July 9th. You call that chickening out?”
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After attacking former President Joe Biden for not imposing high tariffs, he pointedly attacked Cassella. “We had a country people didn’t think it was gonna survive, and you ask a nasty question like that?” he retorted, saying “But don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question. For me, that’s the nastiest question.”
The “TACO trade” term was coined by
Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong last month to describe how Trump scares global markets with tariff threats, forcing the market to plummet before backing off, which allows them to rebound again. “[T]he recent rally has a lot to do with markets realising 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 wrote.
The meltdown didn’t go unnoticed on social media, as critics highlighted how badly the president took the news. “What’s hilarious about this whole thing is there has to be people in the admin who know about this stuff and everyone is afraid to tell him bad news,” wrote Democratic Party strategist Adam Parkhomenko in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “So we get to see him lose his s—t for the first time live on tv.”
