No, Mr. President, I Deserve 37 Dolls for Christmas

How ‘bout ya suck coal, President Grinch!

Here I thought we elected the opposite of socialist-scold: a no-nonsense, wallet-tearing, ravenous consumer of America’s great calorie-packed, microplastic-shedding bounty. After four years of Biden snoring at the inflation lever, Americans gave full-throated ascent to a consumerist orgy. Sorry weenie greenie degrowthers! The North Pacific Gyre just got ten feet wider!

After a summer of tariff-induced price hops, supply squeezes, and angina-inducing grocery receipts, we get the paternalistic reproof that’s the ken of liberals. “You know, you can give up certain products. You can give up pencils,” President Trump told a scrum of supporters during a Mount Pocono rally. He reaffirmed his administration’s devotion to industrial policy over Mattel policy: “You always need steel. You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter—two or three is nice, but you don’t need 37 dolls.”

The hell I don’t, Mr. President! What’s my daughter supposed to fill her three-story Barbie house with? Just one, maybe two, of those perfectly poised petites? No, sir. Not my kid, not my Christmas. Her pink colonnaded abode better be brimmed with coppertoned appendages, like a sorority riot after too much jungle juice. We… I mean she wants every Barbie from dog surgeon, to spelunker, to jiu jitsu blackbelt, to the one sporting a new hat.

Is this wrathful rant just pathetic plasticine consoomerism from a grown man? Yeah, what of it? It’s Christ’s present-packed birthday for Tickle-Me Elmo’s sake. Trump dumped $10 trillion onto our national debt pile. He gets a new ballroom and so many filigree accents in his purpled office that look like Martha Stewart shacking up with Marie Antoinette. Spendgorge for me, not thee, much?

Now, could I make like a good little manosphere trad-dad, and deprive my little ones of all the Chinese bilge that eventually damns our creaks, soils our air, and poisons our amber waves of grain? Sure. And the almighty God may strike me down from the earth-splitting wails emanate from my living room come Xmas morn.

This is America, the “commercial republic” promised by James Madison. When the Nazis came a-marchin’, when the Japanese downed their birds into our boats, we flipped an entire economy into a piston-bursting powerhouse that cranked out commodified carnage. We scorched, sintered, assayed, annealed, and vulcanized pure raw earth into enough combustible nitrate that we saved an entire continent from genocidal dictatorship. Ploughshares were pulverized into swords at an industrious rate that would make Adam Smith retch his ale. After liberating the frogs and routing the Krauts, American G.I.s came home to splurge so hard that an entirely new economic model was born: the demand and supply of the mega department store, which kept the world safe from material privation. We won the pure, precious freedom of a $5 t-shirt sewn by a Camobian malnourished child.

More Americans are alive today who remember the launch of the Nintendo 64 than those who can distantly recall canning peach preserves amidst double-digit unemployment. Yet we’re being lectured to stint our spend for the sake of resuscitating a flatlining manufacturing sector? George Washington may not be spinning in his grave, but my Funko Pop of the first president is weeping vinyl pellets.

Trump’s Scroogeness is being shamefully backed up by his favorite news network. At Fox Business, which is basically Fox News for retirees who force their brokers to sell off bonds every week, one host went even further than shaming parents for toy-shopping. Anchor Dagen McDowell chastised the owners of a Maryland Christmas tree farm for objecting to its befoulment for, of all things, an electric cable powering AI data centers. “There will be transmission lines that have to go through developments and farms. That’s the very nature of a growing economy,” McDowell insisted before stabbing her knifed eyes into the camera and growling, “Buy a fake tree!”

Now, after 600-odd words of polemically defending our polyethylene empire, the reader may assume I’m all for the artificial evergreen, complete with built-in recursive lights. But the cynical peruser would be wrong. There’s a heinous spirit at work in someone pitching the Faustian bargain of Yuletide saplings for ChatGPT-produced Animaniacs porn. McDowell’s arched eyebrows and sinister snarl exhorting against Frasier Firs bear an uncanny resemblance to Renaissance portrayals of Beelzebub. Maybe Mr. Murdoch should hire an exorcist to consult his staff.

Virgil may have warned that all the gold beneath the moon can’t bring peace to tired souls. But he was in the Fourth Circle of Hell, not standing in a snaking Walmart line four days before Christmas trying to buy the last Bluey playset. (The only difference being the temperature—an overweight Mexican mom breathing down your neck, anxious to check out, makes Satan’s inferno feel like the North Pole by comparison.)

Exercising frugality is a noble sentiment. Just not in December. This President, more than his predecessors, is the embodiment of the American id. He should intuitively grasp that we squanderous Yanks don’t want stern tut-tutting about belt-tightening until after New Year’s. Come January, we won’t listen either. But at least our generous Christmas spirit won’t be dampened!