Is Donald Trump Losing His Mojo?
All-you-can-eat humiliation tacos
The last 130 days have turned me into a connoisseur of small victories. Mainly, because they’re the only kind that seem to be on offer nowadays. And so, we in the taco-loving community considered it a good week. Like Mr. Trump, I don’t like to brag — it’s not our way — but I am an aficionado of all kinds of tacos, any kind of taco. At home, I don’t just make sad hausfrau tacos (ground beef, shredded cheddar, Old El Paso seasoning mix — though I make those, too). No sir, I make carnitas slow-cooked in orange/lime juice, spicy barbacoa smothered in crushed adobo chiles, shrimp tacos slathered in avocado salsa with cilantro sauce, and Cajun-panko fish tacos topped with slaw and avocado crema. If it can be wrapped in a tortilla, I will culturally appropriate it. (Feel free to leave your best taco recipes in comments. I will steal them.)
And so it gave me some pleasure to see Donald Trump associated with one of my favorite foods this week, when Wall Streeters hung the term “T.A.C.O. trades” around his neck. (As in Trump Always Chickens Out on his harebrained tariff schemes, thus enabling traders to count on a market bounce when the worst news becomes just run-of-the-mill bad news.) My pleasure partly came because Trump’s taco association inspired the first positive feelings I’ve had toward him since he hawked Trump Steaks® in the Sharper Image catalog. (Who wouldn’t want The Donald hovering over their slab of mail-order meat without a hairnet?) There’s a fate much worse than Trump backing down from his disastrous ideas, and that would be him seeing them through. After having our slats kicked in by inflation for the last five years, nobody’s in the mood to pay even ten percent tariffs so that our children might someday have the chance to stand on an assembly line, putting vibration dampeners into overpriced iPhones, praying for a proper bathroom break so they don’t have to pee in a bucket. (Go Populism!)
