Why is Donald Trump being called President Taco? The nickname he hates becomes instant meme

A new nickname for Donald Trump just dropped and he’s not happy about it.

On 2 April this year, the US president announced a sweeping new set of “reciprocal tariffs” on so-called "Liberation Day" affecting most of the country’s trade partners.

As global markets were thrown into chaos, Trump argued at the time that the economic policy would improve American manufacturing and project jobs. A prolonged trade war unfolded between China and the US, two of the world’s economic superpowers, as both nations raised tariffs in a tit-for-tat fashion, with a peak of 145 per cent US tax on imports from China, and a 125 per cent tax on US imports.

However both countries have since negotiated a truce; the US has reduced the import tax it charges on Chinese goods, bringing it down to 30 per cent.

Just a week after Trump's "Liberation Day" on April 2, 2025, during which he announced sweeping global tariffs, he abruptly reversed many of those measures, reducing them to a baseline 10 per cent tariff.

And last week Trump announced plans to raise tariffs on the European Union to 50 percent, but just days later, he backtracked by pushing the tariff deadline back to July.

Trump has been criticised for flip-flopping, with some critics claiming he “chickened out” of his tariff plan. This has birthed the nickname “TACO” on Wall Street, a cheeky acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out”. The savage term was first coined by the Financial Times.

The president was asked about the nickname by the press on 28 May, 2025. “'That's a nasty question. To me, that's the nastiest question," he replied.

“I've never heard that - you mean because I reduced China from 145 percent that I set, down to 100 and then down to another number. And I said, you have to open up your whole country?' he continued.

“And because I gave the European Union a 50 percent tax – tariff – and they called up and they said, ‘Please, let's meet right now. Please, let's meet right now.’ And I said, Okay, I'll give you till June 9.”

He added: “This country was dying. You know, we have the hottest country anywhere in the world. Six months ago, this country was stone cold, dead. We had a dead country. We had a country people didn't think was going to survive. And you ask a nasty question like that.

“It's called negotiation,” he said, explaining how he sets a “ridiculous high number and I go down a little bit, you know, a little bit” until the number is more reasonable.

More recently, a US federal court blocked Trump's sweeping tariffs ruling that the administration did not have the authority to do so, however an appeal against this decision has been filed.

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