“Americans must learn to adjust to a lower standard of living,” he told the crowd before suggesting a specific solution to prices hiked by his tariffs, which he continues to insist are a success. “You can give up certain products. You can give up pencils…You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice.”
I had to laugh at Leavitt fielding a question in which she was asked about the optics of a BILLIONAIRE telling people to buy less gifts for their kids.
Trump marched onstage insisting he was ready to make America “affordable again,” a line crafted to evoke Reagan-era economic populism that instead conjured Jimmy Carter calling for personal austerity. Trump declared he had “no higher priority” before launching into his usual misdirection by blaming the rising cost of living on his predecessor, Joe Biden.
Keep blaming Biden! Despite assurances things would be fixed as early as the first day, the USA is still not in that great of a shape. How many people will allow Trump to quit taking accountability? Every day that we get more into a Trump presidency it should be harder and harder to blame your predecessor.
If Biden left this country in such a shambles that even the almighty Trump is unable to right the ship, then why the heck did the Donald say he could?
Our gullible countrymen ate it right up and a good amount continue to do so. Mortgaging your future to own the libs.
Keep blaming Biden!
They ALL fucking do it. I just saw that stupid bitch Noem start off one of her non-answering “answers” with some bullshit about Biden. Thankfully the piece of shit got immediately called on it.
Q: Why are you breaking the law when it comes to immigration enforcement? A: Well, President Biden…
That stupid SpokesBarbie Karoline does it, too. Same with Mikey Johnson, and on and on.
And I only wish it was confined to Republicans, but it doesn’t stop there, sadly. Lots of so called independents, centrists and leftists, do it too.
“Your daughters won’t even want dolls once I get through with them.”
He’s talking about dolls again?! I had to check the date… Yup.
He said the stupid pencil thing again, too.
I mean, FFS. Does he have any idea what pencils even cost? And has he been told people are just using a crazy amount of them in school?
This is like the “boomer math” thing with large screen TVs, avocado toast, lattes, and Netflix dialed up to eleven. I just looked on Amazon, and you can buy a box of 576 of them for $35.99. That’s about 6 cents a pencil. Enough pencils for one child to use 37 of them per year for ten years and still have some left over.
Does he think people are coming up short on things like health care because they chose to buy more pencils (and dolls) for their kids?
Oh, so that wasn’t them quoting him from earlier in the year, he’s literally rehashing the weird number of dolls thing?
It’s always 37 of them with him.
In a row?
Every accusation is a confession?
I got the strangest deja vu reading this.
Dude, me too. I read that quote and knew he talked specifically about pencils and dolls some time ago and thought it was just them adding it in for context on his previous statements about affordability/austerity.
This dude is completely cooked.
I’m not going to say he’s particularly wrong, but a) populists can’t get away with telling people to cut back, they’ve already demanded you trade your morals, freedom, and touch with reality for greed, and b) greed isn’t why people are mad, yes consumer goods are getting more expensive, but housing, food, and transportation along with raw materials have become unaffordable.
Panem et circenses. People will cheer for oppression if you ensure their needs are met and they aren’t bored. No amount of circuses will replace the bread. And this clown doesn’t really have the vigor he used to.
“Why is it we only take people from s**thole countries? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few?”
Maybe because people from civilised countries can see that America is the real shithole?
But I’m sure bullying and betraying your EU allies and shitting on them is gonna make all the smart people emigrate to the USA.
What a moron. Just unbelievable.
What a moron. Just unbelievable
And yet, elected a SECOND time!
“Why can’t we get any Swedes?” Because Sweden is functional and we aren’t right now. The Norwegians feel the same.
It’s because we’re only barely above a shit hole country ourselves, so we’re a step up for them, but decent countries won’t lower themselves.
Yeah, they come over here to buy jeans at a 1/3 the price and gun parts. Otherwise, everything else we sell here is cheap quality and tastes terrible compared to European options.
How much could one pencil cost, Michael? 10 dollars?
Here’s 20 dollars. Go see a Star War.
His “Let Them Eat Cake” Tour isn’t going well? Who woulda thunk?
If (as he says) the economy is doing so well, why would people need to " learn to adjust to a lower standard of living"? Yet MAGA supporters just eat this stuff up without questioning.
The MAGA supporters are probably thinking the avocado toast eaters need to lower their standards of living, not themselves.
I still find it hilarious that something like avocado toast (and arugula, lol. And Dijon mustard) has ended up as a shorthand for snobbish effete youngsters who probably also drink their tea with a pinky in the air, but are unable to afford housing and healthcare and childcare, because they are just bad at managing their money and blew it all on these luxury items etc…
I mean, avocados spread on toast. Soooo elitist.
Just eat less avocado toast and then you too can have an $80k lifted 4x4 you only use to commute back and forth to work.
Americans must learn to adjust to a lower standard of living, he told the crowd before suggesting a specific solution to prices hiked by his tariffs, which he continues to insist are a success. “You can give up certain products. You can give up pencils…You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice.”
Trump thinks the economic problem is pencil addicts and spoiled little girls. The guy is a mental ruin.
So are all his voters.
The guy is a mental ruin.
The guy is horribly detached from the reality of normal people, like everyone who’s born into wealth (or has been rich long enough to forget what it was like before). Remember that “how much does milk cost” thing?
The guy is a mental ruin too, of course, which doesn’t help.
Hopefully, this time even his brainwashed moron voters will be able to see through his bullshit lies.
The problem is that even if at some level they realize this, self-deceit and denial is an easier way to deal with the feeling that maybe their whole world view has been a bad mistake, than admitting their whole world view has been a bad mistake and changing it.
Too bad calling for a UN fair election monitoring/protection team is not a realistic or useful action.
In his defense I do think little girls are spending way too much money on K Pop Demon Hunter stuff… But that definitely isn’t the issue with the economy. It’s just everywhere. (I’m a teacher. Can we ban Six Seven and Bro as well?)
Are we great again?
Not Great Depression level yet; just Severely Depressed now.
Mediocre Depression
Are we sure about that? They keep refusing to release the economic reports, and us having lost 30% of our economy sounds reasonable.
Yeah we are great now.
Can’t you tell, we have less pencils in our home and umm… pencils are made with lead, and that is bad for us.
Oh, they are also made with wood and that can catch fire. So our homes are safer.
Umm and uhh… You know, I could slip and fall on a pencil.
So, yeah, We are great again.
/s < if it wasn’t obvious.
Also I know pencils are not made of lead, they are made of graphite.
Mostly ceramic and wood, but you still have a sharp point.
A feckin pencil
Yes, just with less pencils and dolls.
Da! Da! You now have similar living standard as great power of russia. Too many poor? We have solution to that too - bestest solution, da.
Sorry no dying in a wheat field for us. Now if theres a jungle with socialists in it…
Only if you lower your standard of living. Rtfa!
/s
This is some how more out of touch than Dr Oz and his charcuterie board shopping trip. Yes, you don’t need pencils, the suddenly luxury good in my economy.
Why pencils, literally the cheapest writing utensil available? I could see if it was a good pen/pencil set or a laptop, but a piece of wood with graphite? It’s less than a dollar.
I don’t even know if it is the cheapest option, and what the quality is, but I just searched Amazon for “pencils bulk”, and you can buy 1000 pencils for $51.34 - top of the result list.
That’s about a nickel a pencil. Or about $1.89 for 37 pencils, LOL.
People could give up a non-existent habit of buying 10,000 pencils a month and still not make up for the increase in health insurance costs that they are now facing thanks to Republicans who want to throw many of the country into absolute misery…
Probably some specific memory Trump has of seeing a cup with “too many pencils, why do you need so many pencils???” 40 years ago. Just like the doll thing. There are more modern, relevant examples of discretionary spending he could have chosen, but his brain is mush from 1985.
The ‘37 dolls’ could be from the cabbage patch era.
Like all Sociopathic Oligarchs, he’s got OCD hoarding disorder about money. He thinks in terms of quantity, the more the better, so while a doll might be an adequate gift, a GOOD gift would be 37 of them, probably all the same doll because of a volume discount. He’s just giving us permission to accept less.
Signs of sundowning and dementia with little hands on nuclear buttons.
I would bet a million dollars that he was looking at a pencil, probably somebody holding one, when he said it.
Man woman camera person pencil
Doesn’t he only ever use Sharpies to write?
That’s why he’s so Anti-Pencil.
It’s very clear Donald Trump doesn’t understand how the working class lives at all
Trump doesn’t understand anything except greed.
Even his devoted were getting bored to tears by them while there was an actual campaign going on. Personally I hope he just keeps doing it for the rest of his life, and the crowds keep getting smaller and smaller.
I can’t wait until he’s back at four seasons total landscaping again. Those are the venues he belongs in
That was Roodles, but yeah.
Eventually one of the only few ways to make money will be to get paid to attend his rallies.
That would truly kill him if he through a rally and no one showed up.
“They want us to go to batteries!” he jeered. “We don’t have battery content. So let’s go to batteries according to these morons that were in our country.”
What is battery content? Does he mean the raw materials to make batteries?
We are in an age of portability, EVERYTHING uses batteries these days.
And if we don’t have the raw materials to build batteries, then we need to negotiate equitable trade deals with other nations. That’s why we use diplomacy, and don’t just impose our will on other nations.
How did we end up up with the most ignorant person in America as our president?
Probably the shortest answer in this case is: “reality” television.
Pedonald was given that stupid game show to host. People think that reality television is real. People then think he’s a bigly important successful bidness man, and kuntry shud b rhun lik a bidness.
…what is battery content?
The prevailing working theory is that it is the raw materials to make batteries. Remember when he was all concerned about “Rare Earth?”
I mean, I love me some Rare Earth: I Just Want To Celebrate, Im Losing You, Get Ready…great stuff, go listen on Spotify right now! But I don’t think that’s what he was mumbling about.
He’s very memeable. They don’t listen to his speeches they see shit on tic tok or some fascists YouTube or podcast and enjoy that he’s mean to libs. They want politics to be a reality TV show and they got their wish.
We’re in an age in which abundant natural sources of power are easier and easier to get electricity from and batteries keep getting better. Imagine telling someone in 1500 that you could store the power of a water wheel, and use it for your furnace or to replace your horse, and it’s at your demand.
Even with fossil fuel generation, batteries help solve one of the major pain in the ass problems: that input has to equal output. Grid scale batteries mean you can make a day’s power when it’s convenient for the generation side rather than having to have capacity and the labor to spin it up on standby.
The advances in battery technology and renewables in general really underscores what a pile of bullshit we are under in America. It’s time to shovel ourselves out of the shit!
We should have been the leaders in all of it. Hell on the academic research side we were a major player until this year. But we’ve spent the 21st century waffling between going all in on oil and trying to compromise our way into slowly weaning off it.
We seriously need the capacity to make long term investments in industries with capacity to cause long term global changes if we want to be a major power rather than just a collapsing empire. This wasn’t something nobody expected to happen. Carter put solar panels on the white house roof. Everyone knows fossil fuels are categorized as nonrenewable. This was as telegraphed as a bombing run after several days of dropping flyers warning of the need to evacuate.
According to a new POLITICO poll, half of all Americans are finding it difficult to afford food. Even more damaging for Trump, a majority (55%) blames his administration. So Democrats were quick to pounce on his absurd advice. Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona posted on X, “Trump needs private jets and an Oval Office covered in gold but your kid only needs one pencil.”
And because the president is nothing if not predictable, his speech eventually strayed from the economic gaslighting, quickly devolving into angry tangents about alternative energy, immigrants and other odd grievances.
In a particularly baffling moment, Trump attacked the concept of energy storage despite Pennsylvania having recently secured hundreds of jobs with a new zinc battery factory. “They want us to go to batteries!” he jeered. “We don’t have battery content. So let’s go to batteries according to these morons that were in our country.”
In 50 or so years he’s going to be a really fun subject for psych students to analyze
