Sorry, Virginia, but This Christmas is Going to the Dolls

Hear a cracked columnist out: We all misunderstand Santa Claus. The calendar may have just bloomed with May flush, and we’re still four months out from Hallmark taking up an aisle at your local Walmart, but I’ve got Kris Kringle on my cranium. It’s mainly to do with the Big Orange Man sitting in his snow-walled house, the center pole of the American-led global order.

Consider how Santa inhabits every imagination, whether youthfully innocent, cantankerously jaded, or woefully dejected. A generously jolly gift-giver. A cuddly paternal minder. A herald of warm mirth. The deliverer of that ancient covenant between progency and parent, that good works bring the $400 Lego Knight’s Kingdom.

Oh ho ho ho no. St. Nick is a harsh, unsparing judge, measuring your annual virtue to a tincture of turpitude. He’s the Sauron of the season, eyeing you sleeping, watching you awake, staring at you while you’re starkers. And should you step out of line, then it’s a cairn of coal come Christmas morning—except not real coal, which fetches a handsome price in China, but a Playskool lookalike.

If you fancy swapping the iconic red suit for a sable overcoat, you have our national Santa, with his Slovenian Mrs. Claus, and scores of toiling West Wing elves fashioning new and exciting executive orders. And unlike the last withered white guy in charge, the Execu-Claus-in-Chief is far from cherry-nosed chuffed. He’s downright surly, as if the hot cocoa the Mrs. prepared for him was spiked with more than Christmas cheer.

The tariff regime President Trump wantonly imposed on the globe, before capriciously yanking it away, while still jacking up import rates on the ununionized, underpaid gadget crafters of the PRC, threatens to rain tears, not tinsel, upon this holiday season. The plasticine tidal wave that reaches America’s shores starting in September is waning, as tykes’ favorites fall away. Squishmallows, Marvel hero action figures, play cutlery kits, fold-out trucks, Disney princess manikins, Baby Alives—all are dropping off the transpacific ride, floating to the Island of Misfit Toys, which now goes by the name Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

During a recent cabinet meeting, Trump, in his sui generis freewheeling style, riffed on his administration’s economic record, including the stock market dive initiated by his tariff announcement. That’s when he went full Billy Bob Thornton: “You know, somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know? And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.”

Two dolls instead of thirty? And they’ll cost “a couple of bucks more”? OH, I’M SORRY, I THOUGHT THIS WAS AMERICA?!?

This wasn’t a slip of the gabbling tongue, that’s common when the President extemporaneously dictates national policy. He was asked about his sugarless-plum comments days later during an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker. Again, Trump maintained that while his tariffs will eventually “make us rich,” a child having more dolls than teeth is excessive. “I don’t think a beautiful baby girl needs—that’s 11 years old—needs to have 30 dolls. I think they can have three dolls or four dolls.”

There you have it: A central committee for doll distribution!

From each according to her dearness, to each according to her dolly quota. A day later, Trump expanded his estimative net: “All I’m saying is that a young lady, a 10-year-old girl, 9-year-old girl, 15-year-old girl, doesn’t need 37 dolls. She could be very happy with two or three or four or five.”

What’s more, Treasury Secretary and former hedge funder Scott Bessent was dispatched to reiterate how the children musn’t be spoiled: “President Trump talked about the other day the girl having two dolls. And [the reporter]… said ‘What would you tell that girl?’ I said, I would tell that young girl that you will have a better life than your parents.”

Scott can talk dollars, bonds, interest rates, and margin calls all day but he’s obviously never conversed with a five-year-old, let alone anyone whose time preference is shorter than a shriveled inchworm. Most kids fail the marshmallow test.

But obligatory oblations to our wonderous MAGA future aren’t just offensive to any tweener hoping to fill out his set of Spider-Man Funko Pops. (Ahem.) The suggestion that a red-blooded American with a pocket full of greenbacks should withhold consumption for a higher idea is almost profane, if not patronizing. Ever since World War II, which, as sociological observers like Samuel Huntington postulated, created the modern American identity, we’ve been inculcated with the lesson that collectively coercive countries like the Soviet Union and China forced their citizens to settle for deprivation. The United States was superior because not only did Uncle Sam possess more firepower, funded by capitalism’s windfall and aided by our magnet for scientific talent, but that our allowance of consumer choice defined prosperity.

Now, after four years of Joe Biden snoring over an inflation glut, we’re treated to Donny Gorbachev enjoining us to upend our Amazon cart for the sake of filling the scraped-out hollow that once was our country’s steel-forming, iron-welding, piston-pumping industrial base. What’s the stirring cry to convince Americans to accept fewer Yuletide presents? Do your duty, citizen—sacrifice plastics for the public weal? Are AI-generated posters of Trump in Uncle Sam drag asking us to forgo stuffed stockings far behind?

The administration’s post-hoc bafflegab to justify dispossession for a promised bounty doesn’t stand up to the simple Dum Dum logic of the littlest of lasses: If we’re all going to be richer than Marie Antoinette Barbie, why can’t I have the special-edition Samantha Parkington with jewel-encrusted tea set now?

Santa Trump better get his minions producing a good excuse for desperate parents before Black Friday.