More than two decades ago, I semi-seriously proposed calling this website The American Conservative Online. My reasoning was twofold: 1) At that time, we ink-stained wretches were still somewhat in denial about this whole internet thing, so we liked to append “online” to our website titles. 2) The acronym would have been “TACO.”
The hilarity of publishing broadsides against George W. Bush’s proposed immigration amnesties on something called TACO would have been hard to deny, but cooler heads prevailed. (Moreover, few people today feel the need to specify that websites are online.)
Now the acronym TACO is back, this time as a juvenile taunt aimed at President Donald Trump: “Trump always chickens out.” (TAC would still work if the preferred phrase was “Trump always caves.”) It is generally a way for people who think Trump is always bad to nevertheless mock him for flinching from doing something they believe to be bad.
The dumbest version of this genre was probably when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer waved the bloody taco in Trump’s face on Iran.
“If TACO Trump is already folding on Iran, the American people need to know about it. No side deals,” Schumer said, apparently concerned that the Trump administration was being too diplomatic toward Iran. “When it comes to negotiating with the terrorist government of Iran, Trump’s all over the lot. One day he sounds tough, the next day he’s backing off. And now, all of a sudden, we find out that [special envoy Steve] Witkoff and [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio are negotiating a secret side deal with Iran.”
“What kind of bull is this? They’re going to sound tough in public and then have a side deal that lets Iran get away with everything? That’s outrageous,” Schumer added. “We need to make that side deal public. Any side deal should be before Congress and, most importantly, the American people.”
Some two dozen peacenik groups sent Schumer a letter protesting the New York Democrat’s bizarre post. “[We] expect that you will treat weighty issues of war and peace as a statesman and with the serious gravity that it deserves,” they wrote. “Unfortunately, your recent social media video seeking to out-hawk President Trump’s negotiations with Iran fails that test.”
Twenty days later, Trump ordered the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites. No side deals, and presumably Schumer was gratified that a man he otherwise portrays as an unhinged maniac didn’t chicken out of bombing a foreign country.
The TACO trend is attributed to market watchers who say Trump is always likely to capitulate in putatively hardnosed negotiations, such as over the sweeping tariffs he announced during his first year back in office. Since most of the people involved thought these tariffs were excessive, why does scaling them back constitute “chickening out?”
It is exceedingly strange to try to bait someone you regard as a narcissistic madman into pursuing policies you dislike and consider dangerous to the country. But it is a symptom of progressives feeling the need to pose as tough guys in confrontations with Trump.
Moreover, it seems like a misreading of Trump. It is not always clear that his negotiating strategy of making maximalist demands and then settling for something more reasonable always works—the jury is still very much out on the long-term consequences of his Greenland gambit, for example.
But Trump’s pursuit of offramps in untenable political or diplomatic situations, such as the one he appears to be seeking in Minneapolis right now, is actually a good thing about him. (His propensity to get himself, and the country, into such situations is much more of a mixed bag.)
Activists and local elected officials in Minnesota cannot be allowed to defeat the deportation of illegal immigrants, especially after the previous administration allowed millions of them to stream undetected across the border. But that doesn’t mean the current approach in that state is the most effective way to achieve this goal and cannot be modified or improved.
If Trump is able to navigate the crisis set off by two fatal shootings involving federal immigration agents, the gloating about chickening out will come mainly from those who broadly oppose the deportations rather than those who fear the president will abandon his immigration agenda. Our politics have gotten ugly not because Trump always chickens out. Instead, the chickens have come home to roost.
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