OPINION: This article contain commentary which do not reflects the author’s opinion.
BREAKING: Donald Trump melts down after a reporter humiliates him on camera with the “nastiest question” by bluntly asking about the fact that he “always chickens out on tariffs.”
She really went for the jugular with this one…
“Mr. President, Wall Street analysts have coined a new term called the TACO trade. They’re saying Trump always chickens out on the tariff threats and that’s why markets are higher this week,” said a reporter. “What’s your response to that?”
“I kick out?” responded the 78-year-old Trump, apparently mishearing.
“Chicken out,” corrected the reporter.
“Oh… Isn’t that… I chicken out. I’ve never heard that,” said Trump.
The term “TACO trade” recently appeared in The Financial Times and stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” The term refers to the idea that Trump will implement tariffs, the markets will start to crash, and he will then quickly backtrack and attempt to claim a win.
Trump was predictably upset by the reporter’s question—
“You mean because I reduced China from 145% that I set down to a hundred and then down to another number?” he said. “I said you have to open up your whole country and because, uh…”
“I gave the European union a 50% tax, uh tariff, and they called up and they said ‘Please let’s meet right now. Please let’s meet right now,'” Trump rambled on. “And I said ‘Okay, I’ll give you till July—’ I actually asked them, I said ‘What’s the date?’ Because they weren’t willing to meet and after I did what I did they said ‘We’ll meet any time you want.’ And we have an end date of July 9th.”
“You call that chickening out?” Trump asked. “Because we have $14 trillion now invested, committed to investing… When Biden didn’t have practically anything. Biden… This country was dying.”
“You know we have the hottest country anywhere in the world? I went to Saudi Arabia,” Trump went on. “The king told me. He said ‘You’ve got the hottest—’ We have the hottest country in the world right now. Six months ago this country was stone cold dead. We had a dead country. We had a country, people didn’t think it was going to survive and you ask a nasty question like that?”
“Uh, it’s called negotiating,” he continued. “You set a number. And if you go down… You know if I set a number at a ridiculously high number and I go down a little bit, you know a little bit, they want me to hold that number. 145% tariff.”
“Even I said ‘Man that really got up.’ You know how it got up? Because of fentanyl and many other things…” Trump said. “And you added it up. I said ‘Where are we now? We’re at 145%’ I said ‘Woo, that’s high. That’s high.'”
“They were doing no business whatsoever and they were having a lot of problems. We were very nice to China,” he went on, clearly animated by the question. “I don’t know if they’re going to be nice to us but we were very nice to China. And in many ways I think we really helped China tremendously.”
“Because you know they were having great difficulty because we were basically going cold turkey with China,” he claimed. “We were doing no business because of the tariffs because it was so high. But I knew that. But don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question! To me that’s the nastiest question.”
