Trump as the mirror to a Dorian Gray America

By Zhou Han (周航）

“TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out.”

It is a mocking acronym used by the media and Wall Street to describe his fixed pattern: talk tough first, then back down the moment he meets real resistance. The phrase originated in a Financial Times column and was later widely picked up by multiple American media outlets.

Every day, the moment I turn on the television or look at my phone screen, that man who makes me physically nauseous is there again. His face, his voice, that look of self-intoxicated smugness—it all clings like a film of grease that can never quite be wiped away. When I think that I may have to endure him for years to come, what I feel is no longer anger but fear—fear that this world will really allow him to keep occupying the spotlight, fear that humanity has grown so numb it can tolerate vulgarity of this kind. I truly cannot imagine that the world can no longer produce anyone worse than him.

He lost an election and refused to leave the stage with even a shred of dignity. Instead, he kept raising the volume of his populist rhetoric, stirring up buried resentment and prejudice—like churning the sludge in a sewer until the scum and stench rise back to the surface. He lives on division and warms himself on rage. He needs a noise that never ends, because only that noise can reassure him that he is still at the center of the stage.

Why do I despise him? Because he packages coarseness as “authenticity” and disguises shamelessness as “telling it like it is.” He performs “toughness” as a posture, but underneath he is pure TACO: loud on the outside, hollow on the inside; blustering enough to rattle the air, yet always retreating when confronted with real power or real rules—Trump Always Chickens Out.

He makes language dirty. Facts become tools in his hands. Truth, once it reaches his mouth, is reduced to something that can be kneaded into any shape at will. Words like “freedom” and “greatness,” once he has chewed them over enough times, are left as nothing but greasy slogans. He has taught a portion of the public that, if you are loud enough, logic will step aside; if you are extreme enough, moderation will become an object of ridicule.

I despise, too, his attitude toward rules—the way he treats institutions as boundaries to be provoked again and again, and the courtroom as merely another campaign stage. Of course you can say that everyone has the right to appeal, and I do not object to that. But when everything is turned into a serialized drama of “I am right, everyone else is wrong,” the dignity of the rule of law is mocked into a ratings spectacle. As an aside, in New York criminal court, a jury found him guilty on 34 counts; the case is currently under appeal. It was the first time in American history that a former president had been convicted of felony offenses.

On the civil side, because of his sustained defamation, he was ordered to pay E. Jean Carroll 83.3 million dollars, and that judgment has already been upheld on appeal. In the civil fraud case brought by the New York attorney general, liability for fraud was affirmed, but in August 2025 the appellate court overturned the nearly 500 million dollar financial penalty on the ground that it was excessive. The legal battle is still continuing.

I do not intend to list a longer catalog of cases here. To me, these are only the visible tip of the iceberg of the way he has dragged public life into the mud.

What disturbs me even more is his “odor.” It is the odor of summoning up the lowest parts of human nature—vanity, greed, hostility to knowledge, indifference to others—and flaunting them as virtues. He packages cruelty as strength, contempt as humor, incitement as the will of the people. He is not governing society; he is corroding society’s sense of taste.

You may ask: why are there still so many Trump supporters? I can understand part of it—the distrust of elites, the exhaustion with reality, the frenzy of a wounded identity. The tragedy is that what he offers is not an answer but an addictive substitute: he turns a complex world into a simple friend-enemy divide and shrinks real problems into slogans fit only for shouting. Anger comes fast, feels good briefly, and leaves consequences that last a very long time.

Is he really tough abroad? No. Before the strong, he goes soft as water; before the weak, he turns sharp as a knife. He bends before dictators and flips the table on allies. He sneers at truth and kisses lies. His “patriotism” has always meant loving himself; his “negotiation” is often the same tired trick—threaten the market first, then retreat to save himself. That is where the Wall Street joke of TACO comes from.

At times I imagine him as a filthy mirror: as soon as a crowd stands before it, the shadows on their own faces are enlarged, rationalized, and passed from one person to another. Shame is then erased. Decency is recast as weakness. Moderation is treated as betrayal. The extreme emotions of a minority begin to rampage in the name of “the people.”

One reason I loathe him is that he has made evil feel ordinary. Most people do not fully believe what he says, yet they are willing to borrow his methods. They know it is wrong, and yet they relish the thrill of being wrong with complete self-righteousness. That is the real source of my fear: not only the man himself, but the permission he releases into the air—the permission to sink.

I know, too, what some people will say: “Do not exaggerate. He is only a politician who will pass.” But the problem is that he has pushed disgust itself into the background noise of public life. Once we grow used to that smell, we begin to mistake it for air. He may leave the stage one day, but the rot he leaves behind will teach more people to mistake aggression for justice, rudeness for sincerity, and retreat for wisdom.

I write these words not to persuade anyone. I only want to record this revulsion as it rises from the body itself: when I see him, I think of the surface of civilization beginning to mildew; when I hear him, I feel language turning sour in the mouth; when I think of the future, I fear that people will go on treating TACO as “strategy” and retreat as victory.

America produced Donald Trump. To me, he is not “a different political choice,” but an ongoing contamination. If nausea can count as a form of lucidity, then I would rather keep that feeling until this stench is finally replaced by real air.

But whatever else may be said, Trump was elected by American voters, one vote at a time. All I can say is that the fools here deserve exactly such a president, and in the end American voters will pay a painful price for their own choice.