BELIEVE IT OR NOT! TACO, the un-happening of happenings

«A lot happens under Donald Trump, but a lot un-happens, too.

In the past four months, President Trump has announced tariffs on Canada, paused tariffs on Canada, restarted tariffs on Canada, ruled out tariffs on certain Canadian goods, and then ruled in, and even raised, tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum.

And that’s just for starters. On April 2, so-called Liberation Day, Trump announced a broader set of tariffs on almost every country in the world. Soon after, the plan was half-suspended. Then Trump announced a new set of elevated tariffs on China, from which he backtracked as well. Next the courts, as often happens, took over the job of erasing the president’s previously announced policies. Last week, a trade court struck down the president’s entire Liberation Day tariff regime as unconstitutional, only for a federal circuit court to reinstate the tariffs shortly thereafter. Now a higher court has the opportunity to do the funniest thing: undo the undoing of the undoing of the tariffs, which have been in a permanent state of being undone ever since they were created.

Got all that? No, you most certainly do not, and neither does anybody else. Economists and corporate executives I’ve interviewed to understand future tariff policy have communicated to me a combination of confusion, fury, and resignation. Commentators have noticed the chaos too, of course. Observing how frequently Trump seems to back out of his own brinkmanship, the Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong memorably deemed this trend TACO, or “Trump Always Chickens Out.”»

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic