Why Donald Trump and JD Vance Can’t Stop Talking About Dolls

Last week, President Donald Trump went on a seemingly bizarre campaign against dolls. In his May 4 interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he commented that “a beautiful baby girl” should have fewer toys. After all, he opined, she “can have three dolls or four dolls because what we were doing with China was just unbelievable.” JD Vance continued the doltish doll discourse. “We do need to become more self-reliant, and that’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s not always going to be easy,” he said. Then Vance went all faux Marie Kondo on us: “What I’d ask people is not whether they want… twenty dolls for their kids.”

It was the latest example of how Trump’s and Vance’s rhetoric can take reasonable ideas—Buy fewer crappy and expensive things for your kids! Keep factories and auto plants in America!—and twist them into gibberish. These comments are clearly BS—a temporary and transactional austerity. Call it social class kitsch. But these most recent remarks do touch, unwittingly, on something that’s actually important: American kids are being overly defined by material goods and they and we need to buy less.

Twenty years ago, I wrote a book about the branding of youth culture called Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers. As a parent, I have come to understand that raising a child who rejects luxury goods and influencer-touted-lip gloss is harder than raising a child who will eagerly decry the concept of capitalism at the dinner table. I argued then that kids are overly dependent on defining themselves through branded stuff. That’s true whether it’s the Bratz and Abercrombie of yesteryear or the Barbie and Sephora of today. My reporting back then showed me that girls identified so heavily with brands because they felt insecure; some of that insecurity is from the hazards of traditional feminine socialization.

Today, however, it’s also very much an insecurity of our moment: kids and teens fear impending climate disaster and the loss of their bodily autonomy. According to the CDC in 2025, 11 percent of girls ages 3 to 17 have diagnosed anxiety. That’s more than one in ten girls: their rising consumption of a range of products targeted to them is not incidentally connected to their growing levels of unease.

Do Vance and Trump care about girls forming healthy identities outside of dolls and cosmetics? No, of course not. As Susan Linn, the cofounder of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and author of Consuming Kids tells me, “Trump’s flippant remark is not anti-corporate, it is anti-family—especially in the context of an administration that threatens funding for parks and playgrounds, as well as programs that provide children with play alternatives to that which is being sold to them on screens.”

And yes, there are other reasons why telling us to buy fewer dolls is patently ridiculous, especially when tariffs will raise the cost of basic goods, like building materials or avocados. Trump and his ilk will also soon want us to buy more and more, just expensive crap made in America: even late night television shows have created hilarious parodies of this, the best of which is the Tariff Tilly doll.

In addition, there’s a clearly toxic gender element to this particular meme: after all, Vance isn’t advising parents to purchase fewer Nerf guns for their man-o-spheric son. “The reason they keep using dolls as their example is because they’re trying to frame caring about material stuff as feminine and thus inherently shameful,” Leah Greenberg  of the progressive organizing group Indivisible recently wrote on Bluesky.

But the grain of truth that Vance and Trump have stumbled on with their soundbites is something parents today may know all too well. Raising unbranded kids—that is, kids not hypnotized by consumer products—means that children and teens get to grow up with non-commodified imaginations. Democratic leaders should not lose sight of the appeal of this for parents who are everyday being pestered for celebrity dolls and Brandy Melville hoodies. Protecting kids from online marketing, for instance, is the sort of pocketbook political ideal—call it “real family values”—that could be seriously popular.

Meanwhile, Trump continues his absurd and odd campaign, most recently threatening to stop Barbies from being sold in the US, a remark that’s even dumber than the social class kitsch that preceded it. We might even call it “sandbox politics.”