call the national sacrifice falls flat

When Donald Trump announced this week that North -Americans will have to see with less toys at Christmas, carefree comparisons were attracted to the prominent figures in history.

“It sounded like Marie Antoinette saying” Leave them eating cake, “said Whit Ayres, a republican survey.

Economists and employers have been warning for weeks that 145 percent of the President tariff In China it will increase the prices of the usual -north -Americans. The White House has constantly receded on this narrative.

But on Wednesday the mask slipped. Trump said China had done “trillions of dollars … selling -things, and) much that we do not need.”

He said that people had been warning of empty shelves and that “maybe children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls … and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple more dollars than normally.” But “we have to make a fair agreement,” he added.

Here the President acknowledged that his trade war could cause real difficulties to voters, many of whom chose him in reducing the cost of life and increasing growth.

Trump’s enemies could hardly believe their luck. They mocked social media as “Grinch Who Stole Christmas” and “Scrooge Mctrump”. A television presenter, channeling the SopraniumHe called him “Donny 2 dolls”.

“” Your family will have less, but it will be more expensive “is certainly a solid economic field,” the Stand-up comic Mike Drucker wrote in X.

Trump is not the first president to demand sacrifices from the North -American people. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Entrance of the United States into World War II, Franklin d Roosevelt requested a self-decomposing program, with higher taxes and rationing of goods.

“We are all used to spending money for things we want, but they are not absolutely essential,” he said in April 1942. “We will all have to give up such expenses.”

But the FDR’s words were weighty because they were treated by national emergencies triggered by war and revolution, said Julian Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton University.

“This is a crisis created by the person asking you to sacrifice,” he said. “So it’s much less persuasive.”

Trump’s exhortations have a political risk similar to that of Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” of July 1979, at the height of the Middle East oil crisis, when he asked citizens to “set thermostats to save fuel.” He lost his presidency to Ronald Reagan in a landslide of the following year.

Consumers have reacted with disgust to Trump’s call. “This means that now I will have to store dolls for my grandchildren?” She said Cheryl, a 70 -year -old grandmother doing Austin, Texas. “My husband already talks about toilet paper.”

Trump’s comments are part of a large number of white -home statements that give off trade with China. “The North -American Dream does not depend on China’s cheap scales”, Scott BettingThe Treasury Secretary said, he said in March. “We are focused on accessibility, but they are mortgages, they are cars, they are real salary gains.”

These comments have horrified. “I have been attacked by my own government,” said Rick Woldenberg, CEO of Learning Resources, a company based in Illinois that manufactures toys and educational products and manufactures China for four decades.

“To denigrate what we do and to say that these things are trivial and unimportant and people should dispense without them, but it is degrading,” he added. “We don’t believe we just create piles of plastic for people.”

The big names in the industry have seen large bags decrease. The price of the shares of Mattel, a barbie doll maker, has dropped 18 percent since the “Liberation Day” in April, when Trump announced his reciprocal rates.

Isaac Larian, CEO of MGA Entertainment, the largest Toymaker in the United States, said that the rates will be “disastrous”, which foresee a fall in “30-40 percent sales”.

The company obtains 65 percent of its Chinese factories and rates will force them to massively increase prices, from $ 15 to $ 30 for a Bratz doll, one of its most popular items.

“If the rates are not reduced, we will be forced to say goodbye to people, including people from our factory here, really manufacturing toys in the United States,” said Larian, who said he voted in Trump last November.

He asks for a “two to three -year rescue” on import taxes, similar to the exemption Trump allowed for smartphones and computers, while MGA continues with an investment of $ 40 million in a new plant in the United States territory. “This will give you the opportunity to save Christmas,” he said.

However, there is no sign of breath in the trade war, with worrying implications for the economy. The Yale University’s budget laboratory has estimated that Trump’s rates have announced worldwide since the post would reduce the economic growth of the United States by 1.1 percent by 2025.

Some evidence shows that they are stopping the desire to spend people. The Michigan University Consumer Feeling Index for April was 52.2, less than 57 in March, while the inflation expectations of the year passing from 5 percent to March to 6.5 percent in April, its highest reading since 1981.

Trump insisted that rates are a medicine needed for a patient in problems that depends too much on imported goods. According to him, they will force the relocation of manufacturing and supply chains to the North -American Healthy Zone, while the true cost of rates will be borne by exporting countries, not North -American consumers.

But voters are expressing increasing doubts about Trump’s economic policies. A recent survey gave it a rating of approval of only 42 percent, a historically low level for a president so soon within a period.

Perhaps more worrying about the White House, voters seem to lose confidence in its manipulation of the economy: one of their strongest dresses in the November election.

Alex Conant, a Republican consultant who was the director of communications of Marco Rubio’s presidential candidacy, said that there is nothing essentially bad in asking the voters to make a sacrifice, but “you have to give them a really clear reason why.”

The White House said that the rates are needed to increase their income and to help balance the budget, to isolate China, to regain its manufacture, and in the case of Mexico and Canada, to reduce Fentanyl smuggling and illegal immigration.

“These reasons cannot be true at the same time,” he said.

Additional Kristina Shevory Reports in Austin.