There is a familiar formula for a president to spin an economic downturn: acknowledge the public’s pain, explain that the administration is working hard to make things better, and reassure people with some variation of “we as Americans will get through this together.” Presidents keep applying the formula even though it rarely works, perhaps because nobody has come up with anything more convincing.
As President Donald Trump’s radical and chaotic tariff policy derails the economy and throws businesses into limbo, he and his administration have propagated their version of this familiar argument. A president whose entire life is a tribute to instant gratification and poor impulse control is asking us for patience and sacrifice. To put it mildly, this is not a deal he has prepared Americans — especially Trump voters — to accept.
Just hang on, children of America, and cherish your measly toy collection.
In an interview on “Meet the Press,” Trump for some reason chose children’s dolls as the prototypical consumer item affected by likely shortages and price hikes. “I’m just saying they don’t need to have 30 dolls,” he said. “They can have three.” Multiple times, he has posited a hypothetical girl receiving fewer dolls than she might like. Perhaps it’s because he believes dolls are feminine and childish, like the worries about whether he really knows what he’s doing.
When he was asked Thursday in the Oval Office about the plunging number of cargo ships coming into American ports, Trump responded that this is a positive development, despite the fact that it will likely produce empty shelves and potentially lost jobs for dockworkers and truckers. “When I see that, that means we lose less money,” he said. If it hurts Americans, in other words, it’s the price we have to pay to bring down the trade deficit.
Trump’s underlings are spreading this message too. Senior adviser Stephen Miller insisted that once all of Trump’s policies take effect and we depart the “road of financial ruin and doom,” American-made dolls will become even cheaper. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent brought up the hypothetical doll-deprived girl in a Tuesday interview on Fox News. “I would tell that young girl that you will have a better life than your parents,” Bessent said. Just hang on, children of America, and cherish your measly toy collection. Someday you will get your reward.
Even if Trump and his staff were right that these tariffs will make us all rich one day, the amount of sacrifice has to be put in perspective. Reshoring manufacturing and building factories — let alone entire supply chains — can take years. That’s not to mention the fact that products that require labor-intensive production will likely never return to America. These include apparel, shoes and, yes, dolls. As one industry expert asked The New Republic’s Greg Sargent, “Do most Americans want to sew tiny little skirts a thousand times a day?”
It’s not just about dolls, of course; there are many kinds of manufacturing that could in theory be done domestically, if we had the right policies and the patience to reconstruct them. But if Trump is wondering whether Americans will pull together and sacrifice their well-being now based on a promise of something better in the future, he only has to remember the Covid pandemic.
Voters who were already individualistic may not be too receptive to the argument that sacrifice and patience will bring us a better tomorrow.
While the pandemic was full of stories of sacrifice and collective effort, many of the president’s supporters reacted against every request to pull together, working themselves into a lather of resentment and anger over even the most trivial inconvenience; heaven forbid a public health official suggest that it might be helpful to their fellow citizens if they wore a mask at the grocery store.
It reached a point where some MAGA liberty fetishists were so angry at being asked to mask up that they would verbally attack other people they saw wearing masks. Some Christian influencers now argue against empathy, which Elon Musk calls “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” Voters who were already individualistic — and spent the last year being told by Trump that his election would mean a nearly instantaneous bestowal of riches beyond imagining — may not be too receptive to the argument that sacrifice and patience will bring us a better tomorrow. As if Trump’s calls weren’t ironic enough, Thursday was the 80th anniversary of V-E Day. For many Americans, World War II represents a high point of collective sacrifice, when millions of parents sent their sons to fight, women streamed into factories to build supplies for the war, and families planted victory gardens and bought war bonds. We did it all because we knew we could only prevail together. To the president, however, the lesson of World War II is that we should get more credit for winning. “We won two World Wars, but we never took credit for it — Everyone else does!” he said on social media. “The Victory was only accomplished because of us.” It was vintage Trump: classless, whiny, solipsistic and incapable of seeing the larger picture. He has some talents, but inspiring the country to a common purpose is not one of them. When he tells Americans to make do in difficult times, our patience will be tested. And it probably won’t last long.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
