By Ross Douthat / The New York Times
Judging by his reaction to a reporter’s question this past week, President Trump doesn’t like it when you ask him about “TACO,” the reported Wall Street acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” an assumption that makes it safe to be in the market even when the president threatens Europe and China with intensifications of his trade war.
Even if he dislikes the barnyard-fowl comparison, though, the acronym gets at something that’s crucial to Trump’s political resilience. The willingness to swerve and backpedal and contradict himself is a big part of what keeps the president viable, and the promise of chickening out is part of Trump’s implicit pitch to swing voters; reassuring them that anything extreme is also provisional, that he’s always testing limits (on policy, on power) but also generally willing to pull back.
A case study: Just six weeks ago, I wrote a column describing the second Trump presidency as headed for political failure, while noting that a course correction was still possible.
That caveat was debatable, since Trump’s post-“Liberation Day” polling was starting to look like President Biden’s polling numbers after the botched Afghanistan withdrawal. Once Biden hit the low 40s in the RealClearPolitics average, he never again reached 45 percent approval: Some presidents just lose their mandate early and never get it back.
But since that column appeared, Trump has bobbed and weaved away from his most extreme China tariffs, he has achieved some kind of separation from Elon Musk and he has started complaining about “crazy” Russian President Vladimir Putin while casting himself as the great would-be peacemaker of the Middle East. And lo and behold, his poll numbers have floated back up, not to genuine popularity but to a perfectly normal level for a president in a polarized country.
With a different president, you might say that this recovery happened despite the White House’s various backtracks and reversals (plus various rebukes from the judiciary). But with Trump, it’s more apt to say that it’s happened because of these setbacks and recalibrations. Seeing Trump both check himself and be checked by others is what an important group of voters expect from his presidency. They like that Trump pressures institutions they distrust or dislike, from official Washington to elite universities, but their approval is contingent on a dynamic interaction, where he accepts counterpressure and retreats.
Ask Trump loyalists about this pattern, and they’ll often insist that it’s all just part of the Plan; that the president’s apparent setbacks and volte-faces are just indicators of a strategic flexibility that was present all along. So, the seeming daftness of the Liberation Day tariffs is actually a brilliant way to get the markets to accept a more modest but still substantial tariff regime. Or letting Musk run wild with implausible promises about Department of Government Efficiency cost savings is just a way to open the hood of Cabinet agencies and let the president figure out how to control his own executive branch.
In some cases, these arguments can be partially persuasive. I think Trump’s foreign policy, especially, is fundamentally improvisational in a way that’s better suited than some of the more consistent alternatives to the difficult world we now inhabit. Even the seeming shamelessness of his swings can be defensible adaptations to complicated circumstances: It can make sense to try to negotiate with Putin and also to threaten Russia if the negotiations stall out; as it might make sense to be hawkish toward a stronger Iran in 2018 and conciliatory toward a weaker Iran in 2025, and so on.
Moreover, just having the ability to get unstuck from bad decisions is an underrated quality in presidents. One reason that Biden’s poll numbers never recovered from their early swoon is that he (or, well, the team actually running things) couldn’t find a way to reverse course, on immigration policy especially; a little Trumpian ideological shamelessness would have served his White House well.
But any trust-the-plan case for Trump’s approach underrates how much time can be wasted and policy opportunities lost unraveling problems of your own making. The idea that we’re going to end up with the optimal form of re-industrialization at the end of all the Trump trade drama is, let’s just say, extremely unproven; a scenario where the economy just survives the drama seems more like Trump’s best case, with worse ones still very much in the picture.
And then there is just the inherent danger in living, for three years and eight months more, with a president whom we know from the experience of Jan. 6, 2021, doesn’t always backtrack when he enters dangerous terrain.
A contained, checked form of Trumpian aggression seems to be what a subset of Americans want from this presidency. But their support, now as in November, rests on a gamble; that there will be forces strong enough to check him even if he decides not to chicken out.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.
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