While President Donald Trump promises his tariffs will be a net positive for the United States in the long run, his arguments for them in recent days have caused widespread blowback and could become a feature of Democratic attack ads in the midterm elections.
“Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know?” he said during a Cabinet meeting last week. “And maybe the two dolls would cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.”
Trump nonetheless argued that any sacrifices would be worth it because “we have to make a fair deal” with China, the “chief ripper-offer.”
The comments attracted blowback on the political Left, and some on the Right as well.
Former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove said Trump sounded like Ebenezer Scrooge for implying that children will have fewer toys under the tree at Christmas, while Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said Trump sounded “like Big Brother,” arguing that the government should not decide what people can buy.
But Trump, who has never been one to shy away from controversy, stood firm on his comments. He dubbed Rove a “loser” in a social media post and made a similar remark about dolls in a weekend interview.
“I don’t think a beautiful baby girl that’s 11 years old needs to have 30 dolls,” he told NBC News host Kristen Welker. “I think they can have three dolls or four dolls, because what we were doing with China was just unbelievable.”
“I’m basically saying we’re not going to waste money on a trade deficit with China for things we don’t need,” he added, “for junk that we don’t need.”
Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, made another version of the argument at the White House last week, positing that dolls from China might have lead paint while dolls made in the U.S. would have higher environmental and regulatory standards. He predicted that most consumers would agree.
However, such arguments have not enjoyed popularity in the past, which is one reason major politicians rarely make them.
During a natural gas shortage in the 1970s, President Jimmy Carter gave a speech advising people to turn their thermostats down to 55 degrees at night in the winter, saying, “All of us must learn to waste less energy.” The speech used the word “sacrifice” six different times. He gave a similar address, what was later dubbed the malaise speech, two years later, and was swiftly voted out of office in 1980.
More recently, former President Joe Biden’s promises that high inflation would be transitory eventually wore out his welcome with the public and were a major factor in Trump’s return to the White House.
David Madland, an economist with the Center for American Progress, predicted that the doll comments will similarly not age well for Trump.
“No politician wants to say you should have less,” he said. “You can hear some activists maybe making those kind of points, but I don’t hear too many elected officials of any party telling Americans to do with less.”
Madland is not completely hostile to Trump’s vision of decoupling the U.S. economy from a hostile Chinese government, but he said a more coherent argument might focus on electric vehicles or semiconductors, which can be important to manufacture domestically for national security reasons. Dolls, he argues, do not have that same concern.
Trump administration officials have a wider vision of shifting the balance of the U.S. economy away from consumption and toward production, arguing that manufacturing jobs in particular provide high wages for workers without a college degree.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has gone so far as to say that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” while Vice President JD Vance is calling on the U.S. to end its addiction to cheap labor.
“The fundamental goal of President Trump’s economic policy is, I think, to undo 40 years of failed economic policy in this country,” Vance said at the American Dynamism Summit in Washington. “For far too long, we got addicted to cheap labor, both overseas and by importing it into our own country, and we got lazy.”
Still, this type of eat-your-vegetables messaging is politically risky, Hudson Institute adjunct fellow Paul Sracic argued.
“It clearly is very dangerous politically,” Sracic said. “It’s dangerous to ask Americans to lower their expectations.”
That’s especially true given that Trump was elected largely on a promise of growing the economy, and that voters were already weary of high inflation eating away their paychecks in the Biden years.
But Trump’s tariffs have already drawn praise from some industry groups. The National Council of Textile Organizations, for example, issued a statement thanking Trump for closing the de minimis loophole that allowed for duty-free Chinese imports valued at less than $800, saying it contributed to the closing of 28 textile mills in less than two years.
That same loophole, however, allowed for the import of discounted consumer goods, dolls included, that Trump has clearly decided are worth sacrificing to realize his tariff vision.
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Sracic posited that China itself could be a target of Trump’s doll comments. The country’s leaders hope U.S. consumers grow weary of living without its affordable products, and Trump may be signaling that he is willing to dig in before negotiating on a trade deal.
“He’s basically saying, ‘Look, we’re willing to sacrifice to defeat you,’” Sracic said. “Maybe it’s telling China, ‘Hey, this is going to be more difficult than you think. … We can be tough, too. We can lower our expectations a little bit, because we know it’s for a larger good.’”
David Sivak contributed to this story.