President Donald Trump exploded at a reporter who asked him about the latest Wall Street nickname for his tariff chaos.
Trump responded angrily toward a reporter in the White House after she told him that Wall Street investors are using a new acronym, TACO, to describe the ongoing tariff turmoil caused by Trump. The acronym stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out” and was reportedly coined by a Financial Times columnist.
“Wall Street analysts have coined a new term called the TACO trade. They’re saying Trump always chickens out on your tariff threats. And that’s why markets are higher this week. What’s your response to that?” a reporter asked Trump on Wednesday.
Trump said he had never heard of the term before lashing out at the reporter.
“Is it because I reduced China from 145% that I set down to 100%? And then down to another number?” Trump responded. “And because I gave the European Union a 50% tax tariff? And they called up and they said, ‘Please, let’s meet right now, please, let’s meet right now.’ And I said, ‘OK, I’ll give you till June 9th.’”
“I actually asked them, I said, ‘What’s the date?’. Because they weren’t willing to meet. And after I did what I did, they said, ‘We’ll meet any time you want.’ And we have an end date of July 9th. You call that chickening out?” he added.
He continued by criticizing former President Joe Biden and saying that the country was “dying” under him before he exploded at a reporter.
“But don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question. To me, that’s the nastiest question,” Trump said.
He seemed bothered by the question and returned later to the accusation of being “chicken.”
“The sad thing is, now, when I make a deal with them, it’s something much more reasonable, they’ll say, ‘Oh, he was chicken, he was chicken,’” Trump said on Wednesday. “That’s so unbelievable.”
Trump’s meltdown came after multiple reports said Wall Street analysts are using “TACO” trade to describe his flip-flopping policies.
The stock market has been on a roller coaster ride since Trump announced costly tariffs on imports into the United States and then later backed down on them.
The New York Times reported that investors are using the term to describe how markets plummet after Trump makes tariffs threats, only to rebound days later when he backs down. He has done this numerous times since April, claiming that he is just giving countries more time to strike a trade deal with the U.S.
The latest example came from Trump’s recent threat to the European Union, which he said was formed “for the primary purpose of taking advantage of the United States on TRADE.” He threatened the bloc with 50% tariffs starting on June 1, but quickly rescinded his threat after the EU said it would schedule trade negotiations.
Chris Beauchamp of IG Group said in a post that “TACO trade triumphs once again” after Trump backed down on the EU tariff threat. His post was first highlighted by The New York Times.
“Since the first tariff pause back in April, the TACO acronym has become common among investors. It stands for ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’,” Beauchamp wrote in his analysis.
U.S. stocks are drifting on Wednesday, a day after leaping back within a few good days’ worth of gains from their all-time high.
The S&P 500 was down 0.2% in afternoon trading after flipping from an early, modest gain. It’s still within 4% of its record after charging higher amid hopes that the worst of the turmoil caused by Trump’s trade war may have passed. It had been roughly 20% below the mark last month.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 136 points, or 0.3%, as of 2:22 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was mostly unchanged.
The New Jersey university locked Logan Hollar out of his school email and account in August when he tried to pay his tuition. The 22-year-old college senior said he has not been vaccinated and doesn't intend to be, so he signed up for only virtual classes in the fall. When he called the school's vaccine hotline after being locked out, he was told he had to be vaccinated even if his classes were all remote.
Hollar said he has no plans to return to campus before graduation and has asked the university to waive his vaccine requirement. University staff have waived the requirement for some students, but they have already denied Hollar's request once, saying he had missed the deadline for the semester's waiver requests.
"I'll probably have to transfer to a different university," Hollar said.
How a Bergen County kid morphed from struggling indie-rocker to lauded pop consigliere for Taylor Swift, Pink and Lorde
[Excerpts]
Then there’s Taylor Swift, the global icon who is one of Antonoff’s most frequent collaborators. Watch some of her in-studio smartphone videos and you’ll see her with the bespectacled pop guru, fiddling with songs, inventing goofy dances and poking fun at each other like old friends.
“Collaboration with other artists is like you’re on Mars and you’re looking around and you see someone wearing a shirt that says ‘Earth’ on it,” Antonoff says. “Because that’s what bands, celebrities, fame, all that stuff is - it’s Mars. And then I meet someone like Lorde or Taylor (Swift) and we start talking about music and realize ‘you’re like me.’”
Swift, who Antonoff met at an award show in 2013 and bonded with over “Only You,” a 1982 new-wave single by the U.K. band Yazoo, has most wholeheartedly embraced Antonoff’s love for gargantuan ‘80s synth-pop choruses, which also happens to stretch to his home-state muse, Bruce Springsteen.
“It’s my endless need to inject Jersey into everything,” Antonoff laughs. “I’m going to make Taylor Swift records that sound like ‘Tunnel of Love.’”
He mentions Swift’s new tune “The Archer,” a song that flutters over a bed of deep, bellowing synth, as a song akin to The Boss’s 1987 record.
Of the 2,400 registered Republicans in Bernardsville, 500-700 of them received erroneous mail-in ballots, listing the Democratic candidates instead of the Republicans.
Gardner brought the issue to the Somerset County Republican Organization on June 13. The organization’s chairman Al Gaburo notified the county clerk who promised to remedy the mistake.
The error originated with Reliance Graphics, Inc., the printing company which sent out Somerset County’s ballots. Normally, the county clerk’s office prepares the ballots themselves, but shopped the task to Reliance this year because of Gov. Phil Murphy’s executive order that every voter receive a vote-by-mail ballot for the delayed July 7 primary election.
“If we had had a greater lead time when we were sending out these ballots, we would have been able to do the ballot insertion in-house and this error would have been caught,” Somerset County Clerk Steve Peter said.
Corrected ballots with a slip explaining the error were sent back out to all 2,400 Bernardsville Republicans on June 16. The erroneous ballots will be voided, and even so, Republican voters cannot cast votes for Democrats in a New Jersey primary. Reliance will swallow the reprinting and postage costs, at no added expense to taxpayers, Peter said.
Twenty states don't set minimum age for girls to marry
The New Hampshire House passed a bill to ban child marriage in the state and raise the minimum age of marriage to 18.
The measure passed the Senate unanimously in March. On Thursday, it passed the House, 192-174. The bill now goes to Gov. Chris Sununu for signing into law.
One of those voting against was Representative Jess Edwards, whose comments sparked immediate gasps from colleagues.
“… If we continually restrict the freedom of marriage as a legitimate social option, when we do this to people who are a ripe, fertile age and may have a pregnancy and a baby involved, are we not, in fact, making abortion a much more desirable alternative, when marriage might be the right solution for some freedom-loving couples?” he said.
In a state where 18 is not old enough to drink, Edwards believes girls at 16 are old enough to get married. Edwards’ daughter, Elizabeth, served as a state representative, and Edwards said her service was the inspiration for his run for office. He is in his third term.
Child safety and gun control advocate Shannon Watts tweeted that “Child marriage is currently legal in 38 states (only Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont have set the minimum age at 18 and eliminated all exceptions), and 20 states do not require any minimum age for marriage.”
It would be the second time the New Hampshire age of marriage has been raised in the past six years. In 2018, Sununu signed a bill to raise the minimum age of marriage to 16. For more than a hundred years, the law had allowed 13-year-old girls and 14-year-old boys to get married with parent and court approval.
On Thursday, two amendments were proposed to allow some exceptions for those under 18 to get married if they have been legally emancipated.
Rep. Cassandra Levesque, D-Barrington, was a senior at Dover High School and a Girl Scout when she pushed for the bill in 2018. Now, she is one of the seven co-sponsors of SB 359.
“For the past 10 years, I have researched child marriage,” Levesque said. “I’ve learned about the devastating effects of child marriage.”
