We Finally Found the Right Nickname for Trump! Now Every Day Is TACO Tuesday

Listen: Drumpf did not catch on. Don-old felt focus-grouped. When you see someone write tRump on social media, it’s like: I guess that’s the flip side of the “weird aunt who calls Democrats 'DemonRats' in her Facebook posts” coin, but…God, what a shitty coin. Can’t we get a new coin?

This week, we got a new coin. Donald Trump has finally been effectively bullied, and it is something that all good Americans must acknowledge and celebrate. Today may be Friday, but until further notice, thank God it’s Taco Tuesday.

So here’s the deal. A couple of weeks back, Robert Armstrong of the Financial Times wrote about a pattern we’ve been seeing so far in this administration: Trump announces tariffs, the stock market tanks, Trump backs off of the proposed tariffs, the stock market recovers. Investors have begun to ride this wave: buy on the announcement of the tariffs, certain that the surrender is never far away. Armstrong called this practice the TACO trade—an acronym for Trump Always Chickens Out.

I mean, already, yum.

Now, America did not catch TACO fever overnight, because sometimes the important grassroots stuff takes a moment to catch on. But now TACO has Baja Blasted itself skyward and Trump has only himself to blame. Megan Cassella of CNBC asked him about it this week, and this is how that went.

It’s a long video, and I don’t blame you if you don’t want to sit through the whole thing, but my second favorite part of it is right there in the tweet: Cassella tells him Wall Street says he chickens out on tariffs, and he replies: “I kick out?” This is how delusional the guy is: he thinks a reporter is telling him he kicks out. “President Trump, the world is in awe of how you kick out, do you have a comment?”

But he has heard what she said, and we know he has heard it, because of my first favorite part of it: the way he says “I’ve never heard that” with the deflated mien of the person who has absolutely heard that. And then he gets right back into the thing he does better than anyone else in the world, which is yelling (inaccurate) numbers and name-dropping and blaming other people and whining about how poorly he’s being treated. It typically sounds something like: “The King of Saudi Arabia said America was good and not bad like under Joe Biden, and also 14 and you are so nasty.” Inspiring stuff.

Our kooky king Streisand Effected himself. He is mad, and they put it in the newspaper that he got mad. As of this press conference, America is a veritable Taco Town. The memes have been caliente.

Now, these are all well and good and we are still in the brainstorming stage so there are no bad ideas. But I prefer to reach back to a sketch from Trump’s 2004 Saturday Night Live hosting gig, one that has been missing from the show’s reruns and DVD releases, one that is only available via a 2015 segment about it on Inside Edition.

I like this because it is not AI-generated, and also because we have to get some good out of Donald Trump’s work on Saturday Night Live, even if it takes twenty-one years. But I really like it because any screenshot from it will have him surrounded by chickens, and right now we know he hates that.

We here at Esquire do not condone bullying. Bullying is cruel and counterproductive and let’s face it, if we are writers as adults it’s probably because we faced more than our share of it in our youth. Bullying bad is our official position, and we mostly will not budge.

Donald Trump aspires to be a bully, but he has always been something much worse: the bully’s friend. He is a big mouth who will get some good digs in and then run and hide as soon as the shit gets real. You know he has never landed a punch in his whole life, except allegedly against his own son. He is not a tough guy, and this tariff-coaster he’s put us all on is a perfect illustration of it, and he knows it, and he hates it. That is why it feels good to remind him. That is why, in this case, bullying is not only acceptable but necessary.

It reminds me of last summer, when Tim Walz made the simple yet brilliant argument that the current Republican Party is weird. It clicked! Because they are! Obsessing over menstrual cycles? Wanting to check a child’s genitals before they run the 50-yard dash? That shit is weird! How good it felt to say it, and how thrilling it was when they clearly had no way to refute it! They were licked, fair and square. And then some high-six-figure Democratic strategist did away with that line of attack, with the same sweaty consultant energy that gave us Dangerous Donald. And here we are.

“Weird” worked because it was true, and so is this: Trump does always chicken out. He’s a chicken and a whiner and he always will be. Call it out.

When the biggest bully’s friend of our current cultural moment gets bullied, in a way that clearly causes him some degree of anguish, it is our civic duty to join in. If this bullying is delivered through the medium of nicknames, the same kind of nicknames he built a political career out of hurling at friend and foe alike, all the better. You live by the sword, you die by the sword. And if Pam Bondi decides to misinterpret that as a death threat and have me rendered to a Salvadoran torture prison, well, maybe I’ll get a good travel piece out of it.

Schadenfreude: it’s what’s for dinner. Grab a couple packets of Cholula and dig in.