Word of the week: TACO

The food, the initials, the axiom.

An acronym is born

It began as a cheeky coinage in an otherwise serious Financial Times newsletter published April 29 and headlined “The signal from stock/bond correlation” (paywalled; archive link). Here’s how the FT’s U.S. financial commentator, Robert Armstrong, led the story:

Good morning. Donald Trump went to Michigan today to unveil new carve-outs for the US’s beleaguered car industry — just one more instance of the president backing down on tariffs. Call it the Taco trade (for Trump Always Chickens Out). While the Taco trade may not be sufficient to stabilise US asset prices, it sure beats sticking with harmful policies.

Emphasis added.

Taco — or TACO, as U.S. acronym conventions would prefer — proved appetizing: Within hours the coinage had caught on in the financial world. A Boursorama interview with French investor Wilfred Galand was posted on April 30 with the intro “Les milieux financiers emploient un nouvel acronyme : Le « TACO Trade » : Trump Always Chicken Out (se dégonfle).”

Robert Armstrong, the acronym’s inventor, was clearly tickled, posting on Bluesky: “Mon moment de gloire est arrivé.”

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And it didn’t stop there

By the end of May TACO was popping up in non-niche news outlets as well, from the Los Angeles Times (Michael Hilzik: “Explaining the newest Wall Street craze — the ‘TACO’ trade”) to The Guardian to CBS to The Atlantic (gift link) to the Wall Street Journal to Barron’s (paywalled, and I can’t help you out). On May 28, the acronym reached the White House, and even Trump-friendly Fox News was obliged to transmit the story:

President Donald Trump ripped a reporter in the Oval Office Wednesday for asking a “nasty question” about his tariff deals.

“Mr. President, Wall Street analysts have coined a new term called the TACO trade. They’re saying, ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’ - on your tariff threats. And that’s why markets are higher this week. What’s your response to that?” CNBC White House correspondent Megan Casella asked during a brief gaggle.

“Oh, isn’t that nice. ‘Chicken out.’ I’ve never heard that," Trump responded. “You mean because I reduced China from 145% that I set down to 100 and then down to another number? I said, ‘You have to open your whole country.’"

He then huffed: “Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question. To me, that’s the nastiest question.”¹

Better develop a thicker skin, sir. As the Daily Beast reported on May 31:

“[TACO] is actually entering the mainstream culture, and we can see this right here in Google searches,” CNN data expert Harry Enten said, pointing to a graph that showed a “9,900 percent increase on Thursday versus Tuesday” in searches for the term.

From les milieux financiers to late-night meme: Jimmy Kimmel’s staff created a “Taco Man” spoof of one of Trump’s favorite songs, the Village People’s “Macho Man.”

But those breathless reports about “authentic footage” of skywritten TACO above Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida hideaway? Clever idea, but most likely generated by AI, says Snopes.

Fake news.

Meanwhile, Robert Armstrong has been, well, dining out on his surprise success. In a May 29 interview with CBC Canada he explained how he came up with TACO:

So eventually, you’re writing about the stuff all the time, and you just need a tagline so you don’t have to explain what you’re talking about every time.

I was just like trying different things and TACO kind of popped into my mind, possibly because I was hungry, but possibly because it sounds a little bit [like] something like the president would make up himself.

It’s the kind of petty jive² that he sort of likes, and it also has a slightly Mexican flavour to it, which is very funny in the case of this president who's obsessed with the border.

Not just the border: People with memories that stretch back to 2016 will recall Trump’s Cinco de Mayo tweet, which included a photo of the grinning, thumbs-up not-yet-candidate: “The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!” In September of that election year, the co-founder of Hispanics for Trump, Marco Gutierrez, issued what he evidently thought was a dire warning: “My culture is a very dominant culture, and it’s imposing and it’s causing problems. If you don't do something about it, you're going to have taco trucks on every corner.”

In your dreams (and ours), Marco!

Tacos Sinaloa has only four East Bay Area locations. ¡Insuficiente!

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What else can we say about “taco”?

Quite a lot, it turns out. I’ll keep it short.

For starters, no one is sure where the word taco comes from. As the term for a food item — a soft or crispy tortilla folded around some sort of savory filling — it’s definitely Mexican in origin, and undocumented prior to the mid-19th century. Attempts to trace the word to an indigenous origin (say, Nahuatl tlahco, meaning “half” or “in the middle”) haven’t gone very far. It’s more likely an extension of Castilian taco, which could mean a “wad” or a “plug”; according to this theory, edible tacos were named by Mexican silver miners after the plug-like explosive charges they used.

Taco (or tacón) can also refer to the heel of a shoe.

The Tacco brand of shoe inserts and footcare products originated in Germany. I haven’t been able to confirm a connection between Tacco and tacos.

In the U.S., “Taco Tuesday” restaurant specials have a surprisingly long history, according to L.A. Times reporter and taco maven Gustavo Arellano, the author of the 2012 book Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. He tackled Taco Tuesday in a 2018 article for Thrillist:

The earliest-documented advertisement for a Tuesday taco special I could find is in the classified section of the October 16, 1933, edition of the El Paso Herald-Post. Under the headline “Some Good Things to Remember,” the White Star Cafeteria at the St. Regis launched a weeklong campaign to let everyone know it sold “Mexican Tacos” on Tuesday — three for just 15 cents.

1950s ad for tacos (“Mexican sandwiches”) made with Ashley’s brand canned tortillas, which sound appalling. Via Reddit.

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Acronymania

TACO is not, of course, the only Trump-related acronym. As Gustavo Arellano points out, we’ve already had a string of four-letter Trump words, from MAGA and DOGE to yuge and hate.

There’s also #ETTD — Everything Trump Touches Dies — which was (as far as I can tell) coined by Never Trumper Rick Wilson, who turned it into the title of a 2018 book (subtitle: “A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever”).

And the Financial Times, not normally known for its high-spirited creative outbursts, is now “desperately coining new Mexican-flavoured market acronyms in an attempt to go viral.” Some examples from the staff:

FAJITA: Frequently Alpha Just Involves Trading Arbitrage

SALSA: Strange Actors Leverage Safe Assets

TAQUITO: Trump Always Quickly Undoes Initial Trade Offensives

Not as easy as it looks, is it? Gustavo Arellano summed up the situation nicely:

The TACO coinage is perfect: snappy, easily understandable, truthful and seems Trump-proof. The master of appropriating insults just can’t do anything to make TACO his — Trump Always Cares Outstandingly just doesn’t have the same ring.

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And if you’ve made it this far . . .

Maybe you’d like to read my 2022 story for Eat Drink Films about how the Bay Area got hooked on fish tacos.

But wait, there’s more: Over in the subscriber chat, James Asher informed us that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt — she of the conspicuous diamond-encrusted cross necklace — has been dubbed “TACO Belle.” I checked: ’Tis true. (If you don’t get the reference, read this.)

Thanks, James!

1. In 2020, People magazine published a list of “the many people Trump has called ‘nasty’.” There were eleven names on the list; it’s almost certainly much longer now.

2. Gibe?