'Deeply offensive': MSNBC host rips 'gold-plated' Trump for trivializing 'financial hardship'

10 May

MSNBC's Ari Velshi

During a White House meeting in late April, President Donald Trump stressed that if some imported products become more expensive because of his steep new tariffs, that will be a small price to pay for the prosperity and the U.S. manufacturing renaissance that the tariffs will create in the long run.

Trump argued, "You know, somebody said, 'Oh, the shelves are going to be open.' Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally."

A long list of Trump critics are attacking Trump's "dolls" comment as painfully tone-deaf.

Salon's Amanda Marcotte described it as blatant misogyny, while liberal former Rep. Katie Porter (D-California) attacked it as "dismissive." And MSNBC's Ali Velshi, during a scathing Saturday morning, May 10 commentary, accused Trump of making light of the very real — and unnecessary — economic pain his tariffs will cause.

"The president has brought up the hardship that Americans will face multiple times now, as the chaotic rollout of his tariffs have proven both damaging to the American economy and wildly unpopular among the American people," Velshi told viewers. "Like his recent remark that American children might have two dolls instead of 30 this Christmas. Now, he's perhaps using dolls as an example here, because it sounds frivolous and unimportant in the grand scheme of things. But make no mistake, what the president is trying to sell here has nothing to do with dolls and everything to do with the concept of austerity. And that is not what he campaigned on."

Velshi continued, "For ordinary American families who work hard for every penny, reducing financial hardship to a question of dolls is deeply offensive. It's a dismissal of the daily struggle to make ends meet in a country where the cost of living keeps outpacing wages. His sweeping tariffs could cost the average household $3800 a year, hitting working- and middle-class Americans the hardest, according to a report from Yale. When Trump talks about dolls, what he's really saying is: Get ready for hard times, prepare for scarcity. Prepare for prices to spike. You probably won't be able to afford the life that you currently live."

Trump, Velshi complained, surrounds himself with "gold-plated everything" but is "trivializing what amounts to a demand for real sacrifice from working- and middle-class Americans."

"Make no mistake: this is not about dolls or pencils or strollers," Velshi told MSNBC viewers. "It's about deliberately making life harder for millions of families under the false pretense that doing so is necessary for some greater good. But there is no greater good unless you're pretty rich. And even then, it's not clear that tanking the global economy is beneficial, because Donald Trump's tariffs don't just take a wrecking ball to Main Street America — they put the U.S. dollar's global dominance at serious risk of collapse. That's according to the Harvard economist Ken Rogoff."

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