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How to piss Donald Trump off, in 1 *very* easy step 😠

How to piss Donald Trump off, in 1 *very* easy step 😠

PLUS: Sen. Bruce Pearl???

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Chris Cillizza
May 28, 2025
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How to piss Donald Trump off, in 1 *very* easy step 😠
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1. Chicken Donald

(Image via Google Gemini AI)

Donald Trump, emotionally speaking, is an open book.

If you’ve spent any time around him — or even observing him from afar — you know that the simplest way to make him angry is by suggesting he is weak.

Witness this back and forth between Trump and a reporter at the White House on Wednesday afternoon:

Reporter: Mr. President, 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?

Trump: I kick out?

Reporter: Chicken out.

Trump: Oh, isn't that -- I chicken out. I've never heard that. You mean because I reduced China from 145 percent that I said down to 100, and then down to another number, and I said, you have to open up your whole country? And because I -- I gave the European Union a 50 percent 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 'til juni- -- 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 anytime you want. And we have an end date of July 9th. You call that chickening out? Because we have $14 trillion now invested, committed to investing, when Biden didn't have practically anything. Biden -- this country was dying.

You know, we have the hottest country anywhere in the world. I went to Saudi Arabia. The king told me, he said, you've got the hottest comp- -- we have the hottest country in the world right now. Six months ago, this country was stone-cold dead. We had a dead country. We had a country -- people didn't think it was going to survive, and you ask a nasty question like that.

It's called negotiation. You set a number, and if you go down -- you know, if I set a number at a ridiculous, high number, and I go down a little bit, you know, a little bit -- they want me to hold that number, 145 percent tariff. Even I said, man, that really got up. You know how it got? Because of fentanyl and many other things, and you added up. I said, where are we now? We're at 145 percent. I said, whoa, that's high. That's high. They were doing no business whatsoever, and they were having a lot of problems.

We were very nice to China. I don't know if they're going to be nice to us, but we were very nice to China. And in many ways, I think we really helped China tremendously because you know, they were having great difficulty because we were basically going cold turkey with China. We were doing no business because of the tariff, because it was so high. But I knew that.

But don't ever say what you said. That's a nasty question….To me, that's the nastiest question.

Watching it is even more powerful:

@msnbcPresident Donald Trump addressed Wall Street analysts' newly coined term "TACO trade" or "Trump Always Chickens Out," while taking questions from reporters during a Wednesday event in the Oval Office. #MSNBC #news #Trump
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