President Donald Trump on Sunday tripled down on his belief that it's fine that American consumers won't be able to afford as many items as they do currently because his tariffs will raise the price of goods.
In two separate interviews on Sunday—one on “Meet the Press” and another on Air Force One—Trump said that kids don’t actually need a bunch of toys and that it’s fine if they have fewer of them because his tariffs will make the cost of those items more expensive.
"I don’t think that a beautiful baby girl needs—that’s 11 years old—needs to have 30 dolls," Trump said in an interview with "Meet the Press." "I think they can have three dolls or four dolls because what we were doing with China was just unbelievable. We had a trade deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars with China."
Then on Air Force One, he told reporters, “A young lady—10-year-old girl, 9-year-old girl, 15-year-old girl—doesn't need 37 dolls. She could be very happy with 2 or 3 or 4 or 5."
Of course, it's not just dolls that will get more expensive thanks to Trump's tariffs.
It's nearly everything we buy, from clothing to furniture to electronics—the vast majority of which are imported from China and cannot be made here anytime soon because the United States does not have the factories in place to quickly shift production lines or the labor force to sustain those plants.
That is the goal of Trump’s tariffs, with Trump’s billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick saying it’s the Trump administration’s goal to make Americans toil away in factories for the rest of their lives—which few Americans want to do in the first place.
And even if the United States did move manufacturing back, the price of goods would be much higher as the cost of labor here is much higher than in the developing nations where many of our goods are currently made.
Ultimately, in the short term, the tariffs Trump placed on China are so insanely high that companies are just not purchasing any goods from China at all—which could lead to major shortages that means American consumers won't be able to get any "dolls"—or insert any other product that is made in China—at all.
And time is running out for Trump to reverse course on his idiotic trade policy to mitigate the impending doom we all will soon face.
Right now, companies should be placing orders for future shopping seasons like back to school, Halloween, and even Christmas. If companies are too worried to order for those seasons because the tariffs will make it too expensive for them to sell their products, then there will be little to no inventory for shoppers.
Gene Seroka, the executive director of the Port of Los Angeles—one of the busiest ports in the country—explained the impending doom in an interview with Bloomberg TV.
“CEOs are telling me, ‘Hit the pause button. I’m not going to import anymore at these kinds of prices, let’s wait and see. I don’t know if it’s going to be two hours, two days, or two weeks until I get some clarity.’ Then hiring, off the table for right now. Capital investments, paused. And the retailers are telling me that realistically, even with 10% [tariffs], I’m going to have to pass it on to the consumers,” Seroka said.
Seroka added, “If we get a deal, it’s going to take about a month. … About two weeks to get the ships repositioned around these major ports … load up all those containers, and then another two weeks to steam across the Pacific to get to us. This is important because now we’re talking about spring and summer fashion. So we’re kind of at a crux here that we’ve got to get something quick.”
But Trump is undeterred.
Aside from saying that he doesn’t care if goods get more expensive for Americans to buy, he then threatened another insane tariff, this time a 100% tax on foreign-made movies—though it's unclear how on earth that could even be carried out.
In a Sunday evening Truth Social post, Trump wrote:
The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death. Other Countries are offering all sorts of incentives to draw our filmmakers and studios away from the United States. Hollywood, and many other areas within the U.S.A., are being devastated. This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda! Therefore, I am authorizing the Department of Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative, to immediately begin the process of instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands. WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!
The new threat led the stock markets to once again sink, with investors realizing that Trump’s tariffs may be here to stay.
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