Earlier this year, Wall Street coined a term designed to provoke the president on every conceivable level: TACO.
It stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” and initially it was a reference to the White House’s ceaseless back and forth over tariffs. But you could use it to describe the myriad flip-flops that have characterized the administration thus far—from the president’s ever-changing position on arming Ukraine to his suggestion that agricultural workers and hoteliers might be exempt from mass deportations.
The fact is, the Trump administration spends a lot of time trying to please completely contradictory parts of its coalition: hawks and doves, for instance, or a MAGA base that wants to deport illegals, and the blue-collar businesses that hire them. Or, most recently: People who want to Make America Healthy Again by banning a nearly ubiquitous weedkiller, and the farmers who say they need it.
Last week, it became clear that the RFK Jr.–led Make America Healthy Again commission is planning to chicken out of a crusade against glyphosate, an herbicide that the HHS secretary has argued causes cancer.
“There’s many, many, diseases that are linked to glyphosate,” Kennedy told podcaster Joe Rogan two years ago, “including nonalcoholic fatty liver cancer, a lot of kidney diseases, and severe damage to the microbiome.”
