This has been widely analyzed from the consumer side of the equation. As many have noted, Trump—whose own kids were raised in literal golden splendor—is in no position to lecture Americans about accepting scarcity created by his own policies. Indeed, the whole conceit is a tacit admission that the tariffs will hike prices on consumers, which he keeps denying will occur.
Trump’s musings about young girls’ dolls are getting stranger. After floating the thought last week, Trump doubled down in a new interview with NBC News. “I don’t think a beautiful baby girl that’s 11 years old needs to have 30 dolls,” he said. “I think they can have three dolls or four dolls.”
Trump then reiterated the point to reporters on Air Force One, but this time, he grew angrier. “Let’s not waste a lot of time with stupid questions,” Trump ranted darkly, even though the queries posed concerned his own ideas about girls’ dolls, ones that raise obvious questions about the impact he himself expects his policies to have.
Stephen Miller: "If you had a choice between a doll from China that might have lead paint from it that is not as well constructed, as a doll made in America that has a highly environmental and regulatory standard ... and those two products are both on Amazon, that yes, you… pic.twitter.com/HfisWdbJ0b
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 1, 2025Well, the biggest-selling dolls and doll accessories, as of September 2024, were various Barbie products, Monster High dolls, Baby Alive dolls, and Disney Princess products, according to The Toy Book, a trade publication. Those are almost exclusively manufactured by Mattel, with one made by Hasbro. Both companies manufacture large percentages of imported toys in China and other East Asian countries.
One is the molding of dolls’ arms, legs, and other body parts. According to Jonathan Cathey, the CEO of the Loyal Subjects, a California-based toy company that manufactures products abroad, this is typically done with molding machines, with a human worker usually needed to detach finished plastic parts from plastic model-like trees.
“You’re sitting on a line, assembling things, like Laverne and Shirley putting bottle caps on bottles,” Cathey tells me, referring to the old TV series. “Do most Americans want to sew tiny little skirts a thousand times a day?”
There’s no easy way to envision mass domestic doll manufacturing creating lots of good jobs, these people tell me. It’s not just that much of the human-performed work is drudgery. There are also other factors, they say: Lots of the materials you’d need to make the dolls, as well as many of the machines for making them, are also manufactured abroad. So you’d need to import all that anyway.
Even if we could construct a massive and largely domestic supply chain for dolls, it would take many years to spin up. And it’s not clear how long many of the manufacturing jobs would last, even if we did do that. “The only thing that will happen is eventually robots and AI will take over,” Cathey says.
None of this adds up, either. Even if you think some good outcomes might result from producing far fewer plastic toys, lots of quality jobs won’t be one of them. Indeed, the opposite would happen, these industry officials tell me: Because toy companies also employ lots of higher-end professions like design and marketing—and these are the jobs that are concentrated in the United States already—producing far fewer toys would kill many of those good American jobs, while creating far fewer bad manufacturing jobs in their place.
There’s still more. If the stated goal of tariffs is to create durable, high-quality American jobs, weakening unions and gutting regulatory oversight—which the Trump administration is fully committed to doing—is a recipe for further undermining that goal. This is particularly true of something like the toy industry, with its focus on high-volume, repetitive tasks involving all manner of synthetic materials.
“What makes manufacturing jobs good is unions and regulations that protect worker safety,” Bivens told me. “Without those things, any jobs created by somehow bringing toy manufacturing back are not going to be good or safe jobs.”
After all, the whole selling point behind the promise of restored manufacturing is supposed to be that this will create a lot of good breadwinner jobs that will then shore up stable, virtuous manufacturing communities. But trying to reshore things like doll manufacturing—while rolling back worker protections and the regulatory state, which are also core ideological commitments of Trumpism—is a recipe for anything but. The brutal, poorly paid factory work that would result is not what Trumpism, in its gauzy idealized forms, is supposed to be offering.
Yet that would very much be the reality. “Painting eyeballs on Barbie dolls and styling the hair of Bratz dolls,” notes Foreman drily, “aren’t the kinds of jobs that President Trump has promised in Michigan or Alabama.”
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