Why is Trump fixed on toys for little girls? | Moira Donegan

Donald Trump has found a new goal for his trademark and his release: Little Girls.

In the comments of a cabinet on April 30, the president seemed to end the economic effects of his chaotic tariff regime on American consumers by quoting girls as the main complaint. “Someone said oh, the shelves will be open,” said Trump. “Well, maybe the children have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls cost a few dollars more than normally.”

Trump is susceptible to odd non-sequitur, but the dolls have become a sticking point. On May 4, he doubled on board the Air Force One that he insisted that American girls should have fewer toys. “I only say that a young lady, a 10-year-old girl, a nine-year-old girl and a 15-year-old girl don't need 37 dolls,” he told reporters. “She could be very satisfied with two or three or four or five.”

In an interview with Kristen Welker by Meet the Press on the same day, Trump mentioned the dolls again. “I don't think a beautiful little girl – that's 11 years old – needs 30 dolls,” said Trump. “I think you can have three dolls or four dolls because what we did with China were simply incredible.” He continued that American children also have too many pens. “You don't have to have 250 pens. You can have five.”

In some ways, the president's comments seem to be a rare honesty: recognition of reality that his tariffs will violate consumers and reduce their standard of living. With steep tariffs for many consumer goods, especially in China, and the problems of the supply chain caused by retailers and producers, the costs of the new tariffs will compensate for, many common products – yes, including children's toys – shorter in delivery and steeper costs. Due to Trump's politics, it is indeed true that there will be fewer gifts for children under American Christmas trees this year – a trend that is expected to last in the coming years when Trump's trade war triggers an economic recession. The Americans themselves don't have much to say, but Donald Trump wants us to all know that he is less comfortable with us and our children.

In particular, the selection of dolls, especially Trump's deputy for consumer prices, reflects the gender -specific ideas for work, money and purchase that encourage Trumps chaotic economic policy. After all, Trump did not talk about the effects of his trade regime on toy cars or GI Joe action figures -and he certainly did not mention the likely effects on things such as video games, basket balls, squat racks or protein powder. The tariffs will increase prices in the economic sectors and affect consumers of all kinds of goods. But Trump generally did not talk about those who might want to buy a house one day or who are injured by his tariffs on Canadian wood or about those who want to be treated because of their illnesses, but have to pay steeper prices for the medication that they need when tariffs hit pharmazia. He did not speak about consumption that the American uniformly agreed to consider it reasonable, worthy or excited. Instead, he chose something that was considered a trivial, childish and only for girls.

The comments aim to throw the pain that consumers are ultimately female and lightly, irritated to their symptoms and childish. In this regard, Trump is based on a long tradition of economic rhetoric, which is supposed to compare consumption as a female, decadent and morally suspect – and should compare it with the supposedly more male and virtuous productive side of the economy. It is a ridiculously stupid symbolism that only works for those who are deeply committed to their ignorance about how the economy actually works: in truth, everyone and people of all sexes take part in the productive economy. But Trump doesn't argue about the facts: he claims the dominance. And here he throws those Americans who would complain about the economic pain, which he would deserve as female and therefore deserves as contemptuous and deserves no respect as a spoiled children.

The project of the masculinizing economy -possibly in particular at the expense of children -is one that seems to urge the Trump government more generally. Trump claims despite the almost universal claims of economists that his tariffs are laid the USA from the mainly female service industries that have dominated the American economy since the 1970s.

For this purpose, his Minister of Commerce Howard Lutnick, a former CEO of billionaire, went to MSNBC at the end of the last month to describe his vision for the future of the American worker. “It is time to train people, not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future,” said Lutnick, arguing that fewer people should strive for Bachelor degrees and should expect to fill themselves with lower skill instead. “This is the new model in which you work in such plants for the rest of your life and your children work here and your grandchildren work here.”

This is the vision for the future of her children who want to present the Trump government: withdrawn material comfort and joy in childhood and then deprived hope of upward mobility in adulthood. They want them to be poor, desperate and ignorant. You want you to work yourself in repetitive, dangerous, backbreak-body jobs and want you to do nothing better. You want you to imagine your future and future of your children, not as an open horizon of freedom and potential, but as a dark and desperate struggle, without the idea that we could be more than useful instruments for the needs of capital. What do they offer Americans as compensation for this loss? Practical nothing, apart from misogynistic contempt and the assurance that we disappear with falling living standards and our prospects, we are male at least in our suffering.

In Fox News Last Tuesday, finance Minister Scott Bessent tried to put this shoot on things. Besser described what he refused to a little girl who was refused to do the dolls for Trump's tariff policy, and insisted that it was for her own good. “I would say to this young girl that they would have a better life than their parents,” said Bessent. But the Trump government does everything in its power to ensure that the children of America – and especially his little girls – have worse.