'Stop it!' CNN host says strategists begging Trump to 'walk back what he's doing'
Over the weekend, President Donald Trump continued to use his "doll" metaphor to illustrate to Americans how they'll have to make do with less due to his tariffs.
Inside Politics' Dana Bash played two videos of Trump repeating his claim that kids can settle for "two dolls instead of 30," albeit with different numbers.
"All I'm saying is that you don't — that a young lady, a 10-year-old girl, 9-year-old girl, a 15-year-old girl — doesn't need 37 dolls. She could be very happy with two or three or four or five," Trump said aboard Air Force One.
In an interview with NBC's Kirsten Welker, Trump reiterated, "I'm just saying they don't need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don't need to have 250 pencils. They can have five."
Bash remarked that "sometimes when a politician says something, it really breaks through. This is the thing that seems to be breaking through."
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She then played a clip of SNL's Colin Jost giving his comedic take on the subject.
"If I wake up on Christmas morning and I run downstairs to find only two dolls under my tree, I will lose my mind," Jost quipped. "If only two dolls show up when I've made tea for 30? Oh, hell no!"
Kasie Hunt, on the Inside Politics panel, said Trump's "dolls" comments "really rise above the fray" of presidential remarks.
She continued, "I'm surprised he has gone after it again and again and again and again. And some of the strategists that I was talking to over the weekend suggest that it would be better if he would just kind of stop it with — I mean, they don't want him to do anything — they want him to walk back a lot of what he's doing with these tariffs, generally speaking. But this is so personal and makes people understand the pain so acutely that there are a lot of people who are confused, shall we say."
"I just want people to understand why this is so much of a thing," Bash said. "And that is because 80% of the toys sold in America — 80% — are manufactured in China, where the biggest — biggest percentage of tariffs — have been leveraged by the president."