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Donald Trump has found a new target for his trademark mockery and dismissal: little girls.
In comments at a 30 April cabinet meeting, the president seemed to dismiss the economic impact of his chaotic tariff regime on American consumers by citing girls as the primary complainants. “Somebody said, oh, the shelves are going to be open,” Trump said. “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”
Trump is prone to odd non-sequiturs, but the dolls have become something of a sticking point. Onboard Air Force One on 4 May, he doubled down on his insistence that American girls should have fewer toys. “All I’m saying is that a young lady, a 10-year-old girl, nine-year-old girl, 15-year-old girl, doesn’t need 37 dolls,” he told reporters. “She could be very happy with two or three or four or five.”
In an interview with Kristen Welker of Meet the Press that same day, Trump again mentioned the dolls. “I don’t think a beautiful baby girl needs – that’s 11 years old – needs 30 dolls,” Trump said. “I think they can have three dolls or four dolls because what we were doing with China was just unbelievable.” He went on to assert that American children also have too many pencils. “They don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.”
In some respects, the comments seem like a rare bit of honesty from the president: an acknowledgment of the reality that his tariffs will hurt consumers and lower the American their standard of living. With steep tariffs on many consumer goods, particularly those made in China, and supply chain issues caused by retailers and producers frantic attempts to offset the costs of the new tariffs, many common products – yes, including children’s toys – will become shorter in supply and steeper in cost. Because of Trump’s policies, it is indeed true that there will be fewer presents for children underneath American Christmas trees this year – a trend that is likely to continue for years to come if Trump’s trade war triggers an economic recession, as is widely expected. Americans themselves don’t have much say in this, but Donald Trump wants us all to know that he’s comfortable with us, and our children, having less.
But the selection of dolls, in particular, as Trump’s stand-in for consumer prices reflects the gendered ideas about work, money and purchasing that animate Trump’s chaotic economic policy. After all, Trump did not talk about the impact of his trade regime on toy trucks or GI Joe action figures – and he certainly didn’t mention its likely impact on things like video games, basketballs, squat racks or protein powders. The tariffs will increase prices across economic sectors and hurt consumers of all kinds of goods. But Trump did not speak in general terms about those who might like to buy a house one day, or about who will be hurt by his tariffs on Canadian lumber, or about those who would like to be treated for their illnesses but who have to pay steeper prices for the medicines they need when tariffs hit pharmaceuticals. He didn’t talk about any of the consumption that Americans are uniformly agreed to think of as reasonable, dignified or aspirational. He chose, instead, something seen as trivial, childlike, and only for girls.
The comments aim to cast the pain that consumers will face as ultimately feminine and frivolous, their complaints petulant and childlike. In this respect, Trump is drawing on a long tradition of economic rhetoric that aims to cast consumption as feminine, decadent and morally suspect – and to contrast it with the supposedly more manly and virtuous productive side of the economy. It’s a laughably stupid symbolism, one that only works for those deeply committed to their ignorance about how the economy actually works: in truth, everyone consumes, and people of all genders participate in the productive economy. But Trump does not argue based on the facts: he asserts dominance. And here, he casts those Americans who would complain about the economic pain that he is inflicting on them as feminine and hence as contemptible, deserving no more respect than spoiled children.
The project of masculinizing the economy – perhaps especially at children’s expense – is one that the Trump administration seems to be pushing more broadly. Trump claims, despite the near-universal assertions of economists to the contrary, that his tariffs will shift the US away from the primarily female service sector industries that have dominated the American economy since the 1970s back to a more masculine manufacturing base.
To this end, his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, a billionaire former CEO, went on MSNBC late last month to describe his vision for the future of the American worker. “It’s time to train people not to do the jobs of the past but to do the great jobs of the future,” Lutnick said, arguing that fewer people should be aspiring to bachelor’s degrees and should expect to occupy themselves in lower-skill factory work instead. “This is the new model, where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here.”
This is the vision for your children’s future that the Trump administration wants to put forward: deprived of material comforts and joy in childhood, then deprived of the hope for upward mobility in adulthood. They want you, and your kids, to be poor, desperate and ignorant. They want you to work in repetitive, dangerous, back-breakingly physical jobs, and they want you to have no aspiration to anything better. They want you to imagine your future, and your children’s futures, not as an open horizon of freedom and potential, but as a dark and desperate struggle, devoid of the notion that we might be anything more than useful instruments for the needs of capital. What do they offer Americans as compensation for this loss? Virtually nothing, aside from misogynist contempt, and the assurance that as our living standards sink and our prospects disappear, in our suffering, at least, we are masculine.
On Fox News this past Tuesday, the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, tried to put this spin on things. Describing what he would say to a little girl who would be denied dolls because of Trump’s tariff policy, Bessent insisted that it was for her own good. “I would tell that young girl that you would have a better life than your parents,” Bessent said. But the Trump administration is doing everything in its power to ensure that America’s children – and in particular, its little girls – have it worse.
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Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
