They call it the silly season for a reason, but I don’t think anyone was prepared for a prolonged debate about tacos and somehow this was to cause some type of fatal wound to President Trump’s unabashedly masculine image.
While the American people have been subject to an explosion of outrage almost every week since President Donald Trump returned to the White House on January 20, at least most of it was directed at something resembling serious issues, or at least pretending in that direction. Whether you support the President or not, love him or hate him, his major initiatives are likely to have a measurable impact on real people, whether that’s laying off government workers, slashing other programs, enacting tariffs, or deporting illegal aliens. These are both meaningful things with real world impact and strikingly different from what America experienced under the prior administration. Like everything else in life, there will be benefits, costs, and unexpected consequences, and therefore, they should be subject to the highest level of scrutiny and ongoing debate. To be sure, much of what has passed for scrutiny and debate bordered on the absurd at worst or the hyperbolic at best. For example, according to much of the mainstream media and the card-carrying expert class, the stock market was supposed to have melted down by now and the economy along with it complete with tremendous price increases and empty store shelves, none of which actually happened. Similarly, US citizens were supposedly going to be swept off the streets and unlawfully imprisoned, assuming they weren’t left for dead waiting on their Social Security check. There were also more than a few ridiculous moments, such as Senator Cory “Spartacus” Booker’s 25 hour-plus hour non-filibuster filibuster, the idea that Elon Musk was really the President while hailing Adolf Hitler, and blaming plane crashes in foreign countries on President Trump. We might, however, forgive these and other instances because of the way politics is played in our hyperpolarized, social media era, for certainly Republicans haven’t been above similar behavior in the past, myself included at times. At the same time, I don’t think anyone, once again myself included, was prepared for a prolonged debate about tacos, or more accurately an extended meme-a-thon where TACO is an acronym that means Trump Always Chickens Out, and somehow that was supposed to mean something to someone, potentially causing some type of fatal wound to President Trump’s unabashedly masculine image.
For better or worse, this particular meme is credited to Financial Times columnist, Robert Armstrong who used the acronym as part of the phrase “TACO trade” to encapsulate how some investors were taking advantage of changes in tariff policy to anticipate market rebounds. Originally, he wrote, “How to make sense of stocks rallying, spreads tightening and gold falling — while oil and yields are telling you that the growth outlook continues to get worse? Regular readers will not be surprised by Unhedged’s view that the 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. This is the Taco theory: Trump Always Chickens Out.” Setting aside the reality that many of us who have observed President Trump in action over the past decade were well aware he would revise tariffs on the fly to the point where some – like myself again – believed that was one of the benefits of the strategy, while others urged skittish individuals to stay the course believing the market was overacting, Democrats, desperate for anything they believe can wound the President, almost immediately seized on this development, transforming it into a meme for easy, rapid consumption. Thus, X, Bluesky, and other channels were awash with AI-generated images and other composites depicting the President eating tacos, surrounded by tacos, doing everything with tacos, a phenomenon Newsweek described as “exploding across the internet.” This they attribute to a rather obscure influencer, Lucas Sanders with some 33,000 followers (far more than me, but far less than anyone who really matters) who posted “Hey everyone. Let’s get #TACOTrump trending,” only to see it shared a measly 270,000 times. Similarly, the account Canada Hates Trump posted a meme with his head on a chicken, which has been viewed some 400,000 times, better but not by much. Meanwhile on TikTok, a video posted by Binary Infections showing the President running through the New York Stock exchange was viewed 160,000 times. By any objective standard, these are not particularly high numbers for platforms that have billions of users and where the average post from Elon Musk gets over 5 million views, but perhaps even more bizarrely, an SNL skit from 2004 has also resurfaced “countless times” according to USA Today.
This skit shows President Trump, at the height of his Apprentice fame, hawking chicken wings at “Donald Trump’s House of Wings” in a bright yellow suit, mocking the idea that he will try to sell anything, which of course everyone knows is the case and he himself participated in the joke. What one has to do with the other remains to be seen, but Democrats and their enablers in the mainstream media instantly convinced themselves based on this scanty data that the TACO acronym and meme had somehow gotten under President Trump’s skin according to The Hill, making him “so upset” according to the New York Intelligencer. As evidence for this, they cited him lashing out or “erupting” (USA Today) at a reporter who asked about it last week. “Oh, I chicken out. Isn’t that nice? I’ve never heard that,” he said. “Six months ago, this country was stone cold dead. We had a dead country. We had a country that people didn’t think it was going survive,” he continued. “And you ask a nasty question like that. It’s called negotiation.” “You call that chickening out? Don’t ever say what you said because that’s a nasty question.” Though even casual observers of the President know he has responded to other questions in the past using almost the exact same phrasing, nasty being one of his preferred terms dating back to his original campaign against Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016, this was enough to convince Democrats they finally had the weapon they needed. They were aided in this belief when, immediately afterwards, CNN reported on the President’s ire using the usual anonymous sources, who didn’t really say anything meaningful anyway, or at least not in the way the media thinks it does. “Trump also vented his frustrations to his team following the exchange, sources familiar with the matter said. He was not only irked by the term itself but also by his team’s failure to tell him about the phrase gaining traction. ‘It clearly bothered him, primarily because it demonstrated a lack of understanding about how he actually utilizes those threats for leverage,’ said one person familiar with the matter. ‘But obviously he’s not a guy who looks kindly on weakness, so the idea anyone would think that with respect to his actions isn’t received well.’”
According to the Intelligencer, the President’s allies were also “upset too. The hosts of Fox & Friends complained about ‘TACO’ on June 3. Rachel Campos-Duffy, wife of Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, said Democrats are ‘really off-kilter’ and have ‘come up with this really cringy response’ to Trump’s tariffs. Brian Kilmeade cast blame on the Wall Street Journal, claiming the paper is ‘at war with the president when it comes to tariffs.’” Somehow, progressive commentator Ron Smith described this as “losing their minds with the nickname TACO” on X. For its part, The Hill claimed, “The TACO trend has struck a particular nerve with the president, who built his brand on his business acumen and presents himself as a master dealmaker.” They continued, “Democrats and other opponents of Trump have seized upon it because it undercuts his persona as a savvy businessman whose every move is that of a dealmaker outwitting his opponents. While Trump allies see the president’s reversals as a sign of necessary flexibility and part of a grand plan, the TACO acronym suggests Trump gets rattled at the first sign of trouble.” Though the entire world witnessed how hard it is to rattle the President after he almost got his head blown off on national television, Democrats were so enthused that they actually parked a taco truck outside Republican National Committee headquarters earlier this week, complete with President Trump in a chicken suit on the side. The tacos were said to be so popular they were all given away in an hour. Who knew people liked free food in a 90% plus Democrat city? Of course, the summer is generally known as the silly season for this reason, when real concerns and issues are replaced by senseless arguments that fade along with the sun as fall comes around, but still this seems both something entirely new and old at the same time. Old in the sense that, as ever, the mainstream media is magnifying what amounts to meming on behalf of no more than a handful of Trump-detractors into some kind of major viral, potentially damaging moment, citing what are small numbers of views and shares as if they were taking over the internet and TACO signs were sure to appear in every yard any day. New in the sense that Democrats seem to be getting more and more desperate by the day for something, anything that might damage President Trump. They’ve called him Hitler, claimed he was an insurrectionist conducting a coup against the government even as he’s the head of it, mocked his intelligence, appearance, and everything else, but somehow TACO is supposed to be the kill shot despite that everything else has failed miserably? Ultimately, it’s hard for me to believe they truly believe this. Instead, the stench of desperation is so strong, they will pretend to, hoping something, anything can bring down the Bad Orange Man as they have for the past decade.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 