The Phrase Everyone Is Using About Trump’s Tariffs

There’s a phrase that’s dominating the political messaging in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s tariffs: “off-ramp.”

From politicians to business leaders to media commentators, there’s a growing contingent of voices calling for Trump to take an “off ramp” to the sweeping tariffs he unveiled in recent days.

As markets tumble and economic uncertainty ramps up, maybe this so-called off ramp would calm things down.

Here are a few examples of the sudden popularity of this phrase:

• Canada’s Ambassador to the US, Kirsten Hillman, told CNN’s Jake Tapper last week that, “It’s important for us not to escalate to a point where we don’t find ourselves able to have an off ramp or a conversation with the White House.”
• Canadian businessman and “Shark Tank” personality Kevin O’Leary urged Trump to accept the European Union’s zero-for-zero tariffs deal, calling it a “really huge opportunity for Trump to find an off-ramp” in a Monday interview on Fox Business.
• Michael R. Strain, an economist and director of Economic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, published an op-ed in UnHerd on Tuesday, saying that “Trump needs an off-ramp.”
• In a commentary piece for Fortune, author and lobbyist Gary Shapiro, who serves as the CEO and Vice Chair of the Consumer Technology Association, suggested a number of “off-ramps” Trump could take to change course.
• Henrietta Treyz, Managing Partner and Director of Economic Policy at Veda Partners, said on Bloomberg TV that it’s “pretty clear that the off-ramp” to these tariffs is “not coming any time soon.”
• Conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro said Trump “can take the off-ramp” and get to zero tariffs with Israel and Vietnam.
• Media outlets like The New York Times, CNN, and Axios have used “off-ramp” as part of their analysis of the tariffs.
• Social media has also been swarmed with users commenting on Trump’s need to find an “off-ramp.”

So why is this phrase suddenly so popular? It could be that its a concerted effort to use politically neutral and benign phrasing, or just that it’s the best way to describe changing direction.

“It’s a metaphorically neutral way of saying, ‘We probably need to stop this idea’ without saying ‘We need to make a U-turn’ because a U-turn would be incriminating,” Davis Houck, a rhetorical studies professor at Florida State University, told Business Insider. “Metaphors are always about motion and progress and going forward. And so an off-ramp metaphor is still kind of a forward motion. We’re not neutral, we’re not stuck, we’re not turning around.”

Houck said that “off-ramp” is not a new term, but it’s been repurposed to fit this context.

“Politicians are really pretty good at packaging bad news in the least bad ways as possible,” Houck said. “So if I’m trying to say, ‘These tariffs were a really, really bad idea, or we need to pause them,’ using the off-ramp metaphor also means we can get back on the highway if we need to at some future point.”

Politicians have been using similar metaphors to make sense of the economy and the world for a long time, Houck said.

“There’s kind of these cliche ways of thinking metaphorically that paint perhaps a rosier picture or get us to think about things a little bit differently,” he said. “Because that’s what a good metaphor does. It gets us to see things in a different light.”