This week, Wall Street figured out something about Donald Trump (that Vladimir Putin has known for quite a while now) and gave it a catchy name: "TACO." This stands for: "Trump Always Chickens Out."

Let's start with Putin, before we get to the economic TACOs. Trump has been flailing around on Russia's invasion of Ukraine ever since he got into office again, as Vladimir Putin plays him like a violin. This has now descended into outright ridicule:

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Donald Trump may accomplish one big thing as president, in his second term. He may speed up the judicial process to the point where its decisions are still actually relevant when they are handed down.

I say this after the legal whiplash of the last 24 hours or so, as first two federal courts ruled (independently of each other) that Trump's worldwide tariffs were illegal, and then today an appellate court temporarily halted the injunction (which would have erased all the tariffs Trump announced on "Liberation Day"). So we're now (temporarily, at least) back to where we were before yesterday's rulings, as the appellate court has asked both the plaintiffs and the Trump administration to file their responses in the next two weeks. They could issue a final ruling on the appeal at any time after that. Obviously, no matter which way the appellate court rules, this case seems destined for the Supreme Court in the end, but nobody knows how fast they'll rule on it (if they followed their normal schedule, it'd take at least six months or so for a final ruling, but they may well expedite the case).

The case centers on two separation-of-powers questions: Can Congress delegate their constitutional power to levy taxes (such as tariffs), or is this impermissible... and if they can do so, did they actually do so in the law Trump is citing as the one which gave him the ability to levy tariffs on the entire rest of the world on a whim?

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There are two basic ways to successfully deal with a bully: you can stand up to him, or you can laugh at him. Wall Street is apparently now taking the second route, as traders openly ridicule Donald Trump.

There's a new acronym making the rounds on Wall Street: "TACO," or (more specifically) the "TACO trade." It stands for "Trump Always Chickens Out," and it refers to the resilience of the markets after a cycle which is becoming more frequent in Trump's tariff war. The cycle starts when Trump, in a fit of pique, announces insanely-high tariffs will be levied. The market then tanks. Trump then backs off and announces he will be "pausing" the tariffs, or severely rolling them back. The market then gains back what it had lost.

Here's the latest iteration of this new phenomenon:

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Donald Trump never admits he's ever been wrong about anything. His narcissistic personality won't allow him to, most likely, but no matter what the psychological reason behind it is, Trump infamously never admits a mistake. This weekend he came about as close to admitting being wrong as he ever has, which was remarkable enough.

Trump has long admired Russian leader Vladimir Putin, since Putin runs his country exactly the way Trump wants to run America -- with an iron fist, squashing all dissent swiftly and brutally, and never having to answer to anyone for any of it. Trump's Putin-envy (or even Putin-love) has been downright embarrassing to watch over the years, but it has been effective in morphing a good part of the Republican Party away from their traditional stance that Russia is always and always will be an adversarial enemy of this country (see: the Cold War, Ronald Reagan, etc.). But perhaps all of that is about to change, now that the scales are falling from Trump's eyes? One can only hope....

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Because today is Memorial Day, I decided to take the day off.

It has now been fourteen months to the day since one of the worst days Baltimore has ever had, and while progress has been made on rebuilding the Key Bridge, the reopening isn't scheduled for another three years.

So I decided once again to hearken back to a much better day for Baltimore -- a day filled with violence, but one in which America scored a decisive military victory that was a pivotal moment in ending a war. It's a war few people remember today, but the victory is still celebrated before virtually every sporting event that takes place in this country, even if the circumstances have largely been forgotten. So once again, this Memorial Day, let's all take a moment to give the Battle of Fort McHenry its due.

[I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday today, and new columns will resume tomorrow.]

Originally published June 28, 2018

Since today is Memorial Day, I'd like to begin with a remembrance of our most forgettable war, the War of 1812. How forgettable was this war? Well, its bicentennial passed by a few years ago, but the country as a whole took little notice. That's pretty forgettable, as these things are measured. In fact, only one event during this war has become what one might call (if one were in the mood for a pun) a "Key" moment, but more on that in due course.

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Once again, the Republican Party has laid out its real agenda, in the form of a federal budget. And once again, they have proven what their real priorities are: cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans no matter what -- no matter who has to pay for it, or how.

Democrat Rahm Emanuel, who we should mention is considering running for president in 2028, came up with a slogan for Democrats to use when explaining this to the American people: "Tax cuts for the wealthy, healthcare cuts for the many." We have to admit, that's pretty good, although there are certainly plenty of other ways to phrase the basic point. We might go with: "the reverse-Robin Hood Republican budget," since it conjures up the image of: "stealing from the poor to give to the rich." Or perhaps something more personal, such as: "Donald Trump lied to you," or "Trump does not care about your family at all."

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Disasters happen. It's a fact of life. Mother Nature occasionally decides to wreak havoc, and there's not a whole lot humanity can do about it. Steps can be taken to mitigate the worst features of a disaster (such as strengthening building codes), people do what they can to cope with disasters when they strike, and then the affected area goes through a phase of recovery and rebuilding after the disaster is over. Natural disasters can't be prevented, but we do everything we can in their aftermath to ameliorate the suffering. That's the way it is supposed to work, in any case.

Sometimes it doesn't work out that way. Sometimes the response to the disaster is so woefully inadequate that it creates a secondary -- and eminently avoidable -- disaster afterwards. The textbook example of this was Hurricane Katrina. Many people were just abandoned by the government, and the whole world watched in horror as New Orleans turned into a postapocalyptic refugee camp while FEMA floundered around doing not much of anything for days. While nobody could have stopped the hurricane itself, what happened afterwards was a totally preventable disaster of its own.

We now stand at the brink of such secondary preventable disasters actually becoming commonplace here in America. Because the new plan for the federal government is going to be to pass the blame to state governments, while the feds shrug their shoulders, stand back, and refuse to help. I would have said "pass the buck" in that previous sentence, but it's doubtful many actual bucks will be passed along to the states to aid in disaster recovery -- each state will essentially be on its own.

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It is rare enough, these days, to find a story that everyone should be able to agree with and support, especially when it comes to federal court decisions and constitutional law. But today we actually have one, so we're going to ignore the frenzy of wheeling and dealing currently happening within the Republican Party over their Medicaid-gutting new budget bill and instead focus on a story it's almost impossible not to smile about.

The facts of the case come from a small town, where for some reason the town's "municipal code enforcement officer" decided to become an art critic, as it were. The town -- Conway, New Hampshire -- which assumably is run by either petty tyrants or just garden-variety curmudgeons, demanded a local business remove a bright and cheerful mural that had just been painted by local high school students. The business fought back, and a judge just agreed with the owner and told the town to knock it off and chill out (I am paraphrasing the legal language used, I admit...).

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Donald Trump visited Capitol Hill today, in an attempt to browbeat his fellow Republicans into supporting a budget bill. Speaker Mike Johnson has his own self-imposed deadline of passing the bill this week, before Memorial Day. Whether this plan succeeds or not is still very much in doubt, however.

The next step may happen in the dead of night, as the Rules Committee is scheduled to meet and vote on the revised bill at 1:00 A.M. tonight (or, technically: "Wednesday morning"). Post-midnight legislative meetings are pretty unusual, obviously, and if the vote doesn't succeed then the Memorial Day deadline will likely not be met.

Trump met with the Republicans for over an hour today, but it's unclear whether he moved the needle much by doing so. As is his wont, he threatened any holdouts with being primaried, but even this may not be enough leverage. One in particular who was called out by name multiple times by Trump, Thomas Massie, left the meeting stating that the threat of a primary challenge is "not consequential to my vote." Other Republicans expressed skepticism that Trump's pep talk had changed anyone's mind.

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House Speaker Mike Johnson is trying, once again, to herd his Republican cats. As usual, this comes to the fore in the form of a budget bill. With a razor-thin majority and several competing factions, the question is whether he can assuage all of them enough to drag his bill over the finish line this week before Congress scarpers off on vacation once again.

The various GOP factions are aligned in opposition to each other, as one side clamors for deeper cuts to the federal budget and another insists that the only way Republicans will have a chance of keeping their majority in the midterms is not to make such deep cuts -- especially to safety-net programs like Medicaid. A third faction hails from swing districts in blue states and is pushing hard to reverse (as much as possible) a tax provision that was included in the original Trump tax cut bill, back in his first term -- one that seemed specifically designed to punish taxpayers in blue states.

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