'Taco' is the secret to Trump's resilience

Judging by his reaction to a reporter's question this past week, President Donald 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.

- Ross Douthat

Even if he dislikes the barnyard-fowl comparison, though, the acronym gets at something that’s crucial to Mr 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 Mr Trump's implicit pitch to swing voters — reassuring them that anything extreme is also provisional, that he’s always testing limits 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 Mr Trump's post-“Liberation Day” polling was starting to look like Joe Biden’s polling numbers after the botched Afghanistan withdrawal. Once Mr Biden hit the low 40s in the RealClearPolitics average, he never again reached 45% approval: Some presidents just lose their mandate early and never get it back.