That headline is somewhat confusing, since it is not actually "Taco Tuesday," but instead merely the day which followed "TACO Monday." The latter, of course, refers to the neologism "Trump Always Chickens Out," which was created to describe exactly what took place yesterday. But it is also applicable to a different foreign policy stance (or "crouch," more like) that Donald Trump has been taking, which he is now threatening to change (but probably won't).

Way back on the day after April Fool's Day, Trump unveiled his "reciprocal tariffs" on the world. Wall Street immediately freaked out, and a week later Trump was forced to put a "pause" on the implementation of such tariffs. This was the original chickening out that gave rise to the new term.

Trump stated that the high tariff rates (which were figured on a completely arbitrary basis) would not go into effect for 90 days. Today, those 90 days are up. Throughout this period, Trump and the White House have been routinely promising an avalanche of trade deals will be announced -- real soon now! "We'll have 90 deals in 90 days," was the main talking point, although Trump at times boasted that they'd been talking to "over 200 countries" -- which is rather impressive, since 200 independent countries do not actually exist on this planet. Either way, big deals were coming! Maybe next week, who knows? Over and over again this refrain was repeated: lotsa deals, you betcha, any day now! Stay tuned!

As with much of what Trump promises, however, the reality has been far different. Here we are at Day 90, and Trump has zero actual trade deals to show for his efforts. This isn't all that unusual, since real trade deals are hundreds of pages long and usually take years to negotiate. So Trump has been moving the goalposts. He has managed, in all that time, to get two handshake agreements -- with the United Kingdom and Vietnam. Full details have not been released to the public in either case, beyond a short list of bullet points. These are not actually trade deals, but rather trade frameworks at best, or "the precursor to a real deal." Trump also claims credit for a deal with China, but this is not reality either as it was merely both countries backing down from their extreme positions to the positions they had previously held, while talks continue (China is the only country with a separate deadline; one that still has roughly a month to run).

So, instead of "90 deals in 90 days," Trump managed two rough frameworks for future deals, and one other détente agreement that returns to the status quo ante. So much for "talking to over 200 countries," eh?

Yesterday, Trump announced he was chickening out once again. This, of course, is not how the White House framed it, but when asked about it today by a reporter, it's hard to even know what Trump is trying to say in his desperate attempt to spin it all as somehow part of the original plan. When asked, "What happened to '90 deals in 90 days'?" Trump's word-salad response was [Editorial Note: We tried to properly put into place "[sic]" markers in the following paragraph to show all the grammatical errors, but we ran out of them before we got to the end, so instead we just decided to present it as-is. Our apologies for not doing so -- we have more "[sic]" markers on order, but they're coming from China so who knows when they'll arrive or how much we'll have to pay for them. Anyway, back to Trump's word salad...]:

Oh, we've spoken to everybody. We know every. It's all done. I told you. I told you we'll make some deals, but for the most part we're gonna send a letter. We're gonna say: "Welcome to the United States. If you'd like to participate in the greatest, most successful country ever." I mean, we're doing better than ever. We have. I don't think. And you're gonna see these numbers soon. We've never had numbers like this. We've never had investment like this. Uh, we have more than 90. We're gonna have much more than 90. But most of those are gonna be sent a letter. This is exactly what I said. Now, we've made a deal with United Kingdom. We've made a deal with China. We've made a deal. We're close to making a deal with India. Others, we've met with, and we don't think we're gonna be able to make a deal. So, we just send them a letter: "Do you wanna, do you wanna play ball? This is what you have to pay." So, we're, as far as I'm concerned, we're done. We're sending out letters to various countries, telling them how much tariffs they have to pay. Some will maybe adjust a little bit depending if they have a, you know, cause. We're not gonna be unfair about it. And actually, it's a small fraction compared to what we should be getting. We should be. We could be asking for much more. But for the sake of relationships that we've had with a lot of really good countries, we're doing the way I do it. But we could be getting a lot more. We could ask for a lot more than what we're asking for.

What Trump was referring to (about those letters) is his face-saving gesture that he unveiled yesterday. He's been talking about doing this for a while, but yesterday he actually sent out letters to over a dozen world leaders which stated: "Here is the tariff rate you will be paying" -- all of which were also arbitrary numbers that Trump picked out of thin air. However, the important part (where the TACO comes in) was the news that these tariffs won't begin tomorrow (which would be Day 91 on his original "pause"), but instead on the first of August.

True to form, Trump tried to cover all this up with some "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying calendar?" bluster. He insisted that this new extension somehow wasn't actually an extension, as Politico reported today:

"TARIFFS WILL START BEING PAID ON AUGUST 1, 2025.," Trump posted Tuesday morning to Truth Social, the social media website he owns. "There has been no change to this date, and there will be no change. In other words, all money will be due and payable starting AUGUST 1, 2025 - No extensions will be granted."

. . .

"It's always been Aug. 1. That's all, paying it. A statement was being put out today, and I put it out just to make it clear. It wasn't a change. It was Aug. 1," Trump said, despite having to sign a new executive order Monday to extend the July 9 deadline.

Trump is desperately trying to save face, after his grand "let's bully every other country into the world into submission" plan has utterly failed. He has slipped the deadline, and he is now redefining what a "trade deal" means, which will now apparently include those letters he just sent out. The New York Times pointed this out (after commenting that: "For the president, a trade deal seems to be pretty much anything he wants it to be"), quoting Trump's remarks to the press today: "The deals are mostly my deal to them. We have made some deals. We can make a lot more deals. It's just too time consuming. It just makes it more complicated. And we can do things over the years, too. A letter means a deal. We got 200 countries. We can't meet with 200 countries."

So, to summarize, Trump unveiled a new extension while attempting to explain that it wasn't actually an extension, he is trying to redefine a "trade deal" to mean "me unilaterally telling another country what their new tariff rate will be," and everything is going swimmingly and according to his grand plan. And this time he's serious! No more chickening out! No, really! He means this time!

The other TACO foreign policy news is that Trump is once again blustering about perhaps (just maybe, mind you...) trying to convince Vladimir Putin to end his invasion of Ukraine by using something a little stronger than a disapproving social media post. This comes after last week's announcement that the U.S. would be halting weapons deliveries to Ukraine, which was walked back today when Trump reversed course (blaming the Pentagon for the earlier announcement). Trump had a phone call with Putin last week, where Putin (as usual) did not suddenly decide to please Trump by ending his war of aggression.

Which got under Trump's skin, for some reason (even though it was no different than how Putin has been stringing Trump along, ever since Trump took office again). So Trump used some rather strong language today when addressing the situation:

President Trump stepped up his criticism of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Tuesday, accusing him of duplicity a day after saying that Ukraine needed more weapons to defend itself against Russian’s invasion.

"We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth," Mr. Trump told reporters during a cabinet meeting. "He's very nice to us all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless."

. . .

"We're not happy with Putin. I'm not happy with Putin. I can tell you that much right now, because he's killing a lot of people," Mr. Trump said.

At another point, he said Mr. Putin was "not treating human beings right," adding that the Russian president was "killing too many people, so we're sending some defensive weapons to Ukraine."

File Trump's "it turns out to be meaningless" epiphany under "Better late than never," we suppose, as he seems to be the last one to have now realized what has been pretty patently obvious all along.

So now Trump is now (sort of) giving a nod of approval for a bill in Congress which would slap some seriously Draconian tariffs (up to 500 percent) on countries that are still buying Russian oil and other energy products. This would cut off Putin's funding source in a big way, which is precisely what it is designed to do. The bill has been languishing in Congress even though it has strong bipartisan support (it will easily pass both houses), because the Republican leaders have been waiting for some sort of signal from Trump.

To date, Trump has not slapped any new sanctions on Putin or Russia. He has not brought any pressure to bear, in an effort to force Putin to the bargaining table. It has instead been a string of TACOs, ever since Trump was sworn in.

Will this now change? Will Congress now actually pass this law and put it on Trump's desk? Will he sign it -- or at the very least use it as leverage when talking to Putin?

Or will Trump just chicken out again, and let his B.F.F. just do whatever he feels like doing in Ukraine? At this point, betting on the TACO seems like the safest thing, just given Trump's performance to date.

We will close with this reminder (which seems necessary, given the subject), because it's worth pointing out once again that Trump swore he'd end the war in Ukraine "on Day One."

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant