Carson Burch ’27 is considering a Government major. He likes reading about historical and current events, as well as dinosaurs. Contact him at ceburch@wm.edu.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
Of all the political memes over the summer, one of the most shared memes — especially in the political world — was TACO. This acronym, coined as a means of criticizing perceived indecisiveness from President Donald Trump on tariffs, was widely shared and discussed; however, the core assumptions motivating it were wrong, and the consequences of the tariff threats becoming real are potentially catastrophic.
For those who did not hear about this, TACO is an acronym coined by Financial Times journalist Robert Armstrong meaning “Trump Always Chickens Out.” Motivating this acronym was an assumption that Trump is a coward who will always back down from decisions he makes due to any sort of pressure he faces. The phrase was coined to describe Trump’s tendency to make massive tariff threats but then fail to follow through. It was seized upon by the commentariat as well as Trump critics online as a way to lampoon his decision to back down from the most extreme parts of “Liberation Day” — Trump’s decision to announce a number of sweeping tariffs on every nation on Earth. Everyone had a lot of fun posting AI edits of him and attaching the term to him as a nickname, especially because the mere mention of the phrase made him angry. The Democrats even rented a taco truck near the White House to join in before the meme died.
However, the more time goes on, the more it seems that the White House is intent upon implementing its tariffs. The “trade deals” with foreign places like the United Kingdom, European Union and Japan imposed baseline tariff amounts of at least 10%, and new tariffs on other nations such as India and Brazil range even higher. This is despite legal challenges to the tariffs (an appeals court even ruled many of them to be unconstitutional) and anxieties about whether or not they will cause inflation.
If TACO was correct, none of this would be happening. After all, the entire premise of the acronym was that he would back down from such policies easily because he is afraid of blowback and negative market reactions. So why is this happening?
The simple answer is that the only pressure Trump perceives is the pressure on him to act. Markets haven’t melted down like they did last time, which removes any pressure on the White House to act differently. Furthermore, the one thing Trump hates more than anything else is the appearance of looking weak, and all of the sneering about how he “always chickens out” is something that he almost certainly perceives as making him appear to be weak. Since he cannot mentally stand that thought, he will now probably stay the course of protectionism and dig in solely to spite all of the people who lampooned him as “TACO Trump” after he backed off from the tariffs.
While I’m not an economist (though I am taking Intro to Microeconomics), it seems to me like the economic revitalization that the Trump administration promised is not going to happen. The jobs reports show that the economy is weaker than previously suspected, and inflation is still not to pre-COVID-19 levels. While prices have not yet increased as dramatically as some predictions expected, they may yet still do so. In any event, the economic effects of this could easily turn out to be very, very bad. Tariff levels are already at the highest point since the implementation of the 1929 Smoot-Hawley Act, and that law is traditionally viewed by historians and economists as a key factor in helping exacerbate the Great Depression.
Although the temptation among some will be to post memes about how Trump and his supporters ruined the country on the false expectation that life would be more affordable if he were elected, we should probably all avoid doing so. A recession impacts everyone, and the pain it will cause already-hurting rural Americans who rallied behind him is pain his college-educated critics may find they also get to share in. The millennials were not saved from the pain of the Great Recession by having degrees, and I don’t think Gen Z should assume the same.
I’m not so sure we should all be posting memes about that.
