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When President Donald Trump mused that “maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know?” it wasn’t a deeply developed critique of late capitalism, or a sly nod to Weberian asceticism. Still, for those of us who’d been hoarding items in a Temu shopping cart, it did raise some important philosophical questions: Is a car vacuum necessary? How many baseball hats can you stack? How many dolls is too many? Once again, Trump reached into our guilty, greedy, modern hearts and dug out the nostalgia for a simpler time when we were content with less. But also, once again, he skipped over the dirty details.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with a doll manufacturer and a policy analyst about tariffs and Americans’ relationship with choice. Elenor Mak, the founder of Jilly Bing, talks about her dream of giving Asian American kids the choice of having a doll that looks like them, and how the new tariffs might kill it. Martha Gimbel of the Budget Lab at Yale discusses who would actually be hurt by the tariffs, and the choices they take away—and what you could actually do if you wanted to shift American consumer behavior.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Last week, at a Cabinet meeting, while answering a question about tariffs, President Donald Trump mentioned dolls.

[Music]

Rosin: Now, this wasn’t any deep social commentary, just an offhand statement. But it did get me thinking about how kids today—including my own—do have a million dolls versus, say, when I was a kid.

Rosin: This is Elenor Mak.

Rosin: When Elenor was a kid, like when I was a kid, what she didn’t have was that much choice. But even after Elenor grew up and had her own kids, the options were still pretty meh. There were basically blond dolls, some brunettes, and some that Elenor describes as “vaguely Asian.”

Rosin: So when Elenor had her daughter, she did not want her to have the bowl-cut model. She wanted a doll that her child could actually relate to. So Elenor did the thing that most people do not do—

Rosin: She started a company to make her own dolls. It’s called Jilly Bing, partly named after her daughter, Jillian.

Rosin: She wanted to create them in the U.S., but she couldn’t find a doll manufacturer here who could do it.

Rosin: So Elenor looked outside the U.S. and found a factory in China that she developed a close relationship with.

[Music]

Rosin: Things were going okay for Elenor. She got some good press in places like CBS—

Rosin: —and the Today show.

Rosin: But then came the tariffs.

[Music]

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Tariffs are no longer an abstraction. They are showing up in shopping carts—supermarket and virtual. And they are forcing a lot of Americans to reckon with a way of living we’ve taken for granted—products get made cheaply somewhere else, giving us an abundance of choice over here.

We’ll talk more later about how tariffs have the potential to change American culture, but first: the Jilly Bing emergency—what tariffs look like from the side of the American producer who is determined to give us more choice.

Before the most restrictive tariffs on China went into place last month, Elenor Mak was already in emergency mode. A factory she’d developed a good relationship with announced they had plans to close—totally unrelated to the impending trade war. So like every good entrepreneur, Elenor hustled.

Mak: And that whole process nearly broke us—just really kind of rushing inventory in and starting work with a new factory—and I thought that was gonna be the worst of it.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Mak: So when the tariff announcement came, it was almost like, Wow. It just felt debilitating.

Rosin:  And when you heard about the tariffs, did you immediately go into action? Like, call the staff, sit back of the envelope, figure it all out? Did you call people? How did you move through that process?

Mak: Yeah. I think there was a part of—you know, speaking to a lot of founders who are also in consumer-products sourcing from China, Vietnam—I think a lot of us just said, This can’t be. This won’t pass. This is a political move. This won’t actually go through. So I think it was disbelief. But there was also a need to start actioning, right? Calling our factory, calling the freight forwarders, trying to understand what the impact was.

And I would say it was just chaos. No one really knew, right? There was speculation: This is what it could look like, or, If you get it in by this date. But [at] the end of the day, there was this risk that by the time our imports came in, we would be hit with this 145 percent price increase.

Rosin: So the decision—I understand. So the decision is even about putting in orders because you don’t know what’s going to happen at the back end. It’s about the uncertainty because you just can’t predict the entire process. You can’t predict it from beginning to end, so you could be stuck with this inventory that you then have to pay so much more for.

Mak: Absolutely. So for me, you know, now that you’re—I’m walking down memory lane: We were about to sign a purchase order, right? So April—and then that way we would get the goods in by sort of August, September, right before the holidays, to have it arrive into our warehouse. But once we sign that purchase order, that becomes binding. And then, you know, once it arrives in the port, whatever the prices are, I am responsible for that. So for me, the decision was to not issue that purchase order.

Rosin: I see. Okay. So it’s April; you’ve got a decision to make. So I see why you had to do this really quickly. Numbers are going through your head, like, How much more is this gonna cost? Everything that you mentioned. But on the other side of it is your company, this thing that you’ve built that’s very personal. So how did you weigh all that?

Mak: I think it was pure exhaustion. It was a feeling of, Oh my gosh, how many more of these boulders coming downhill can this small business [take]? Right? It’s largely me who was full-time on the business, and I think just from a mental capacity, I was burned-out.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Mak: And to think about, you know, signing that PO, waiting for my shipment to come in, and holding my breath until it arrived at the port to figure out what the price could look like, it was just, I think, more than I could bear. And I was devastated, right? Because I think for us, you know, it was always about giving more families choices. I think one thing I wanted to share is: This doll is meant to be Asian American. And our doll has brought joy to a lot of kids and adults, and it was devastating to think this could end if I’m forced out of business.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Mak: But for me, in the short term, we have inventory, we have the silver lining, and I can ride this out for some time. But that inventory also will not last forever.

Rosin:  You know what? I don’t know that I have a good sense of—maybe this is just how entrepreneurs are. I don’t know that I have a good sense of whether you—do you think you’ll weather this? I can’t tell. Like, how realistic a hope is that?

Mak: I can only weather this if the policies change in the next year. And so as an entrepreneur, I think, I’m hopeful. I’m optimistic. But I’m also practical when I look at my numbers, when I see my inventory, you know, the trends. So yeah, maybe that’s why you’re not—it’s like a part of me is optimistic things will sort itself out before my sort of self-imposed deadline of when we would need to place a PO comes out.

Rosin: So before the last doll is out of your house or wherever you keep the dolls, things have to shift politically.

Mak: Yes, because with the current tariffs, there’s just—I cannot survive.

[Music]

Rosin: That was Elenor Mak, founder of the doll company Jilly Bing.

After the break, the other side of the equation: Us, the consumers—our coffee, our toasters, our cars, our assumption that all things are available to us instantly. That’s in a moment.

[Break]

Gimbel: My name is Martha Gimbel. I’m the executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale, which is a nonpartisan think tank that analyzes the impacts of federal economic policies.

Rosin: So Martha, I know the Budget Lab has been busy tallying up how Trump’s tariffs are going to change the prices of all kinds of goods for Americans. I myself am thinking about the long term, like how our consumer culture around cheap products might change. But first I want to talk about some specifics.

We just talked to an independent doll manufacturer, so want to use that industry as an example. Say it’s my kid’s birthday coming up, and I want to buy them a doll. What is the landscape I’m looking at?

Gimbel: It’s not ideal, I think is the technical term, you know? We just don’t produce that many toys in the United States anymore. And, you know, I think people sometimes get a little bit itchy about that, and they think, Oh, we should be making things in the good old USA. But that makes things much more expensive, and it also means that if you’re making toys, you can’t do other types of jobs, which may be more highly compensated.

Rosin: Right. And just to dig in, let’s say you have to buy a toy in three months— like, are we talking twice as much? Like, do you have any projections? Since I know this is what you guys do. Like, how much more expensive would I expect it to be?

Gimbel: So it depends a little bit on where specifically the toy is made, how much the producer of the toy was able to get inventory into the country ahead of time, how much they feel they can try to pass the price onto their consumers, etcetera. Just as an example, we think that in the short run, rubber and plastic products overall—so obviously, a lot of dolls are made out of plastic—will increase their prices by about 22 percent.

But obviously, given the tariffs on China, if something’s entirely made in China, it will likely increase by much, much more.

Rosin: Yeah, so for weeks now, we’ve been warned that we should expect prices of certain goods mostly made in other countries to go up, like rice, toasters, coffee, I mean, plastic goods, like you just said. Can you project overall how much a household budget of an average American family is likely to go up?

Gimbel: Yeah, so we find that we think that, you know, on average, households will pay about $5,000 more a year.

Rosin: Wait—$5,000? That’s actually a lot.

Gimbel: It’s a lot of money. You know, most people can’t easily absorb that in their household budgets, right? If you say to people, all of a sudden, To consume what you consumed last year, that’s gonna cost you $5,000 more, that makes people a little bit itchy, understandably.

One thing I should say is that as a share of income, it is a higher percent increase for households at the bottom. And that is because poor households tend to spend more of their income on goods, right? If you are a lower-income household, you are spending much more as a share of your income on shoes for your kids, food, things like that. Whereas higher-income households may be buying vacations, which are not tariffed.

Rosin: Right. Are there some surprises that Americans might have in store? Like, things that you found are likely to go up way more than we expect? Things that I maybe don’t even associate with China or know are made in China?

Gimbel: To some extent, a lot of this is quote-unquote “obvious,” right? We are expecting the big hit to be on clothing, for example. I think a lot of people realize that their clothes are not made in the United States. I think the thing that is going to be harder for people is: Even things that are made in the United States may buy inputs from abroad, right? So just because you’ve made the effort to find something that is produced in the United States doesn’t mean that they’re not getting cotton, silk, wood—whatever it is—from outside the United States.

Rosin: So when you look at the landscape, are you thinking very few things are exempt from this? Like, most things are gonna be more expensive?

Gimbel: I mean, services, technically—

Rosin: Yes?

Gimbel: —should be exempt from tariffs. Although, we did just see the president announce that they’re going to be tariffing movies. I’m not entirely sure how that would work. But, you know, in general, I think there are very few parts of the goods-producing economy that we are expecting not to be hit.

And I think one thing that’s important to keep in mind, right, is: Say that you are, by some miracle, a domestic producer who is totally insulated from this, right? You buy your fabric from a nice fabric producer down the road who gets everything in the United States, etcetera. Why would you not raise your prices, right? So all of your competitors have to raise their prices by, let’s say, 10 percent in the face of tariffs. You can raise your prices by 8 percent, still get a lot of market share, and get the benefit of those higher prices. And so we do also expect even domestic producers to raise the prices.

Rosin: Oh, okay. That I hadn’t thought of. So everything—all prices get raised. I mean, that just makes economic sense. Like, you’re just increasing your profits.

Gimbel: Yeah, why not? I mean, in the face of tariffs, it really is one of those no-place-to-run, no-place-to-hide kind of thing[s] for the consumer.

Rosin: I want to talk about the problems President Trump says he’s trying to solve with tariffs, because he talks about how short-term pain is worth it for the long-term gain, and that we’ll see factories reopening in America. What do you make of this conversation we’ve been having for decades now about manufacturing shifting overseas?

Gimbel: You know, I think that there is a lot of nostalgia for manufacturing.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Gimbel: I think one of the things that I find really bizarre about this entire conversation is that the United States is this incredibly rich country. And yes, to be clear: There were, you know, jobs lost in response to the “China Shock,” in response to automation. But even so, if you can think about which country in the world has one of the strongest economies, most vibrant economies, where you can succeed, it’s the United States. Other countries want to be us. They are trying to make their economies more like our economy. Why are we trying to be like other countries?

Rosin: I see. So you are seeing it as a positive evolution away from manufacturing, so it’s hard to understand what the nostalgia for manufacturing is.

Gimbel: Yeah. I mean, in 1902, we all used to work in farms, right? And you know, yes, there are people still in the United States who work in farms today. A lot of their work looks very different than it did in 1902. And those jobs were really, really hard, and we’ve evolved to a version of the United States where we get to buy goods produced cheaply by other people who do really, you know, physically painful work, and we get to provide services and be paid—in the realm of the world—a pretty high wage for that. That seems like a really good deal to me.

Rosin: Interesting. Do you think that that’s a perspective from an expert looking on high and doesn’t take into account people’s feelings about service work or people’s connection to factories or, you know, all these kinds of things that Trump talks about? The things that people are missing? Because it sounds so easy when you say it.

Gimbel: I mean, I want to be very clear: Economists are not always great about people’s emotions. And so I do not want to deny that. It is also the case, right, that there are people who used to work in manufacturing who have lost those jobs [and] have found it relatively hard to adjust to the new economy. And I do not want to dismiss the pain that those people have experienced, and it’s been very acute pain for those specific people. For our overall economy, though, the shift to services has been really, really positive.

And so I think there’s a couple of things that kind of all get jumbled together here. Some is the specific, acute pain that the people who were not winners from the shift to a services economy have felt. And the other is a desire for what is seen as, like, a more old-fashioned version of America, and people are using manufacturing as some kind of proxy for that.

I don’t want to come across as if I’m like, There are no problems here. You know, the hollowing out of the middle class has been a real issue. But I think it’s really important not to accept the premise that the problem is that manufacturing moved to China.

Rosin: Right. I see. The problem is way more complicated than that. And from someone like you who looks at the big picture of the economy, it feels like an evolution, and it’s a little confusing why we would want to undo it.

Gimbel: Yeah, I mean, there are things that you can do to fix the economy, make it more equal, make people feel like they have more opportunities, etcetera. Putting giant tariffs on China in an attempt to bring back jobs that are legitimately hard and relatively low-paid jobs to the United States is not going to end the way I think a lot of people want it to.

Rosin: Okay. Here’s another big question: Americans are, in fact, used to cheap prices and infinite options. Is that fair to say?

Gimbel: Yeah. I mean, we love cheap prices, and we love being able to just pop over to the store and pick whatever doll out we want for our kids.

Rosin: Oh, it’s funny you should mention dolls. So Trump did make the statement about dolls: Kids could have two instead of 30. And I am not pretending that Trump was making some kind of well-developed policy statement, but it is a diagnosis that people on all sides of the political spectrum have also made over the years.

So what do you think about that sentiment in the context of this tariff-heavy moment?

Gimbel: I mean, look—we can have a cultural conversation about: Do we have too much stuff? That is different than the economic conversation of, like, Should the government be putting strictures in place such that it makes it hard for people to buy the stuff that they want?

I think one of the things that’s been sort of confusing to people is that the Trump administration has started to say some of these things that sound a little bit, you know, for lack of better phrasing, central plannery, which is not something people have traditionally associated with government in the United States, much less the Republican Party. And so it’ll be interesting to see how the American public responds to that.

You know, I think on the “Do we all have too much stuff?” thing, I think, again, it is easy to be nostalgic for, you know, quote-unquote “a simpler time.” And my version of the story is that, you know, I had an Easter-egg hunt for my daughter and, you know, other small children a few weeks ago, and my mother and I were out there in the morning scattering plastic eggs. If any small children are listening to this, the Easter Egg Bunny was scattering the eggs.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Gimbel: And my mother said, you know, When I was a child, we didn’t have this. My mother dyed literal eggs and hid them in the backyard, and then we hunted for eggs, and we hoped we found all of them, because otherwise it smelled terrible.

Rosin: Yeah.

Gimbel: And, you know, I think there’s just a lot of things like that that we just don’t think about, like: Do the children need plastic eggs? No, they’ll be fine. They’ll survive. Is it kind of nice? Yeah, it is.

Rosin: That’s an excellent example. I totally see what you’re saying by “central plannery.” I got that concept immediately. It’s, like, shifting culture from the pulpit, as it were.

But why not go back to dyeing eggs? Like, don’t you need to be forced into artificial scarcity? Like, is there a universe in which higher tariffs do have a potential to shift consumer habits and maybe help out this addiction to cheap? Because we all know that the addiction to cheap encourages bad labor practices and pollution all over the world. So it is a big problem that’s hard to shift.

Gimbel: You know, if there’s something that you think is bad, you can tax it, right? So, you know, this is one thing that economists are in favor of but almost no one else likes, is a carbon tax where you put taxes on the amount of carbon that it takes to produce something, because there are externalities to that.

The thing about tariffs, right, is they’re just, like, a blunt, inefficient tool. So maybe there are things that are—just to stick with the carbon example—you know, very high-carbon intensive that are being produced that we’re happening to hit with tariffs. But we’re also hitting bananas. Why are we tariffing bananas? We can’t grow bananas in the United States, certainly not at scale. Why are we tariffing coffee? None of this makes any sense.

Rosin: I see. So it’s just too crude an instrument.

Gimbel: Yeah, we’re just—we’re hitting everything, rather than trying to think about: What is the behavior that we are actually trying to do here? Are there things we are trying to disincentivize? Is there revenue we’re trying to raise? Is this the most efficient way to raise revenue? And we’re just saying: Everybody’s tariffed. We don’t like it when we buy things from other people. And that’s where we are.

Rosin: Right. Right. So there isn’t any intentionality. If you wanted to shift consumer culture, improve the environment, you would be doing it in an entirely different and more targeted way.

Gimbel: Yes. I mean, I will say: I’m a little itchy on, you know, using taxes or, you know, economic incentives to shift culture. I think that’s a broader conversation.

But there are places where, you know, there is behavior that has spillover effects—like carbon—to society and the economy. And we do think about taxing those kinds of things, but we are taxing that specifically, rather than just a broad, everything’s-gonna-hurt-now approach.

Rosin: Right. Like, the very obvious example is: higher gas prices, less driving, like what they do in Europe. Can you see any scenario where this all unfolds in the way Trump imagines, which is short-term pain for long-term gain?

Gimbel: No.

Rosin: No scenario in which, like, the American manufacturing—more things are manufactured in the U.S.? You know, people figure out where the—how to make an American doll factory? Like, none of that seems realistic to you?

Gimbel: No, it doesn’t. And you know, first of all, you have to think about trade-offs here. So sure, if you do the tariffs, it is likely that some manufacturing jobs come back to the United States. That is absolutely the case. You are almost certainly going to lose a ton of construction jobs—just as an example, just in that one sector—because construction relies on a lot of inputs from abroad, and if those become much, much more expensive, they’re not gonna build as much, and people are going to lose jobs.

And so you have this focus on this one specific, relatively small part of the economy, and you’re gonna ding the rest of the economy for that one small sector. And even within that sector, right, there are gonna be some manufacturers—as we were discussing before—who are going to suffer because they rely on inputs from abroad. And so what you’re going to do is have a very, very expensive way of creating relatively few jobs in small industries, but everyone else loses.

Rosin: Who do you think is gonna be hurt the most in the next year or two?

Gimbel: You know, as we were discussing earlier, you know, as a share of income, this is gonna hit lower-income people harder. But the real answer is: everyone. This is going to hurt everyone. Everyone’s going to be paying more money at the grocery store. They’re going to be paying more money for children’s clothes. Jobs are going to be lost. There will be impacts for the stock market. There are no wins here. This is not good. And I think because it seems so insane, people want to say or find some something that will be better because of this. And that’s just very, very, very unlikely.

Rosin: Well, Martha, I really don’t relish ending an interview on no silver lining and no wins for anyone, but I think that’s just the reality. So thank you for delivering us this medicine. I appreciate it.

Gimbel: Anytime.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Sara Krolewski. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, remember you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at theatlantic.com/podsub. That’s theatlantic.com/podsub.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.