Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Trump, Tariffs, TACO, & Tesla with David Pivnick of McGuireWoods LLP 6-4-25
04 Jun 2025
In this episode, David Pivnick, Partner at McGuireWoods, joins Scott Becker to dissect today’s economic and political headlines.
Full Episode
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. We're talking today with one of our most brilliant guests. He joins us regularly with David Pivnik, who's a partner at McGuire Woods. He also is the valedictorian of his law school class. He represents healthcare systems, healthcare companies, often in false claims cases, defending them, guiding them.
He also works with private equity funds who invest in healthcare and trying to assess potential claims and challenges. A really bright guy. We're going to go off script today a little bit and talk about some of the issues of the day. We're in a fascinating economic situation. We've got... New jobs created this month, the worst in a long time, but open jobs still pretty high.
At the same time, the stock market is up. There's this new discussion, and today's discussion is really going to be around the four Ts. Taco, Trump, tariffs, Tesla. I really want Elon Musk there, but he's not a T, but Tesla's a T. But David, they've talked about this thing called taco, which is this concept or the narrative putting forth by pundits that President Trump
Trump attacks, then chickens out, and they use that to describe some of these trade negotiations. He makes a lot of noise, but maybe the bark is bigger than the bite. Any sense of this? I mean, you've watched a million negotiators over the course of your career, a lot of negotiators dealing with high-stakes litigation. What's your sense of that? Is that just a bad –
take on what's going on, or is there truth to that? Or do you have any feel for how you view this new narrative, Trump attacks and chickens out? Any thoughts there?
Yeah, I'll start with it from a bit of a side angle, which is I find the whole attack on that front and the coining of the phrase taco, you know, one part clever and one part incredibly stupid. The one part that's clever about it is Clearly, the folks who are pushing it recognize fully that it's the kind of thing that will get under President Trump's skin, will irritate him, will make him unhappy.
And they're doing it, clearly, to tweak him and to get under his skin. And so from that standpoint, you can see how it's a little bit clever because they're sort of succeeding politically. in their goal.
The flip side of that is the very people who are doing that are the same people who in the next breath would tell you what they don't like about President Trump is that he's mercurial and unpredictable and potentially will lash out. It seems weird to criticize the tariffs and criticize the approach and then do something that is almost affirmatively prodding President Trump
to take stronger action to avoid the taco name sticking. I feel like the very folks who are upset about tariffs and how things have played out are creating a situation where they're almost priming the pump for President Trump to take a harder stand. So from that standpoint, I find it just...
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