From MAGA to ‘TACO'
For a man who built his Make America Great Again brand, in part, on his cartoonish projection of strength, there can be no nastier comment than calling Trump a chicken.
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With his mean-girl insults and movie-villain glare, Trump relishes being the self-righteous crusader who squares up against his enemies. Even during an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania campaign rally last summer, Trump, his ear apparently grazed and bloodied by a bullet, pumped his fist in the air and yelled
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That image, which Trump has
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'So I just tried to think of a catchy acronym, and TACO happened to be the most kind of amusing one that I could think of,' Armstrong said.
It's amusing others as well.
After Trump again walked back one of his trade-war threats, MSNBC host
On his late night show,
'Let's Go TACO' is also a spin on 'Let's Go Brandon,' which, during former president Joe Biden's White House tenure, became a stand-in for a profane anti-Biden chant popular among Trump supporters.
Why TACO riles Trump is obvious. It exposes the indecisiveness and chaos he tries to pass off as calculated leadership. But it also takes one of the president's favorite devices — deploying a punchy phrase such as 'You're fired,' from his reality show days on 'The Apprentice'; 'fake news,' now a staple of the autocratic lexicon; or his 'Big Beautiful Bill' — and flips it against him.
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'[TACO] is actually entering the mainstream culture, and we can see this right here in Google searches,' Harry Enten, CNN's data guru, said during a recent segment. He pointed to a chart that showed a whopping '9,900 percent increase' in searches of the acronym between Tuesday and Thursday of last week.
Armstrong came up with TACO to address Trump's erratic trade war. But the notion that he chickens out can be applied to other things, including his barely there negotiations with President Vladimir Putin of Russia on ending the Kremlin's unprovoked war against Ukraine.
If Democrats calling his strange tangents during campaign rallies 'weird' during the 2024 presidential campaign got under Trump's thin skin, then TACO, which jabs at his weakness, cuts right to the bone. Back in the day on 'Saturday Night Live,' Chevy Chase portrayed then-president Gerald Ford as an inveterate klutz, which, right or wrong, publicly branded him as an incompetent dolt.
Now, more than anything Democrats have concocted to counter Trump 2.0, TACO could have the same power to define and undercut this destructively unstable presidency. With one memorable term tailored specifically for Trump, the troller-in-chief is getting deservedly trolled.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at
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