When Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong coined “TACO” — short for “Trump Always Chickens Out” — to describe President Trump’s pattern of walking back tariff threats, he offered a smart distillation of a familiar trend. But in a media landscape driven by viral shorthand, the term quickly caught fire across political circles and social platforms after a reporter asked President Trump about the new term gaining pickup on Wall Street during a press conference on May 28th.
Armstrong’s column, published in early May, wasn’t breaking new analytical ground. Trump’s pattern of trade threats followed by strategic retreats is well-documented by economists and diplomats alike. But the packaging is what made Armstrong’s point cut through. It captured a decade of political behavior in a digestible, digital-native format. TACO wasn’t just an acronym; it was speaking the language of the internet.
While the political press took the bait — covering the acronym, the DNC’s stunt truck, and the ensuing shade war — the bigger story here is that a veteran journalist at a legacy financial publication coined a phrase that spread across social media like wildfire.
Here’s what the numbers say about TACO across YouTube, X, and BlueSky from May 28th date to June 11th:
- 2 billion potential reach
- 73.8 thousand unique authors
- 3.9 million engagements
These numbers are even more impressive when you look at other recent viral moments in politics. In the weeks following Dave Portnoy’s viral criticism of the Signal scandal, his comments generated only 46.7K engagements. Ben Shapiro’s comments about the Qatari plane only generated around 83.4k engagements.
The takeaway? Even in the most traditional domains, a little digital fluency goes a long way.