My first time using this site so sorry if my question was answered before or I'm breaking some sort of rules/ custom this site has.
Let's say someone is taunting another person like: "It's not like you would know anything about it, you don't have a mother."
The other person may respond in someway that caused the taunter to flinched back and a bit afraid.
The taunter then replied with something like : "Okay, okay, sheez. I didn't know that you are this easily triggered."
So what's the word to describe what the taunter is doing at the end there. I want to say he's retracting his statement but he is not quite doing that. I guess remedy/ rectify the situation could work but I doubt it suits the situation.
If any of you has an idea for the word or phrase, I hope you could answer this question. Since I most likely made tons of mistake when asking this question, I would also appreciate people correcting me on how I was supposed to ask the question.
Edit: Thanks to all of you that answered the question. I found an answer I was looking for so once again, thank you. For some unknown reason, I can't accept your answer even though I wanted to, I was clicking on the tick button but nothing happened.