Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent thinks young girls should thank President Donald Trump for giving them a better life—even if it means they’ll get fewer dolls this holiday season.
Bessent addressed concerns on Tuesday that the sky-high tariffs on China could lead to empty toy shelves by the end of the year, following Trump’s comments that young girls may get “two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more.”
“I would tell that young girl that you will have a better life than your parents, that you and your family, thanks to President Trump, can now be confident again, that you will have a better life than your parents,” Bessent told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Tuesday. “Your family will own a home. You will have a good education. You will have economic freedom. That’s what we are advancing.”
Over the weekend, Trump told Meet the Press that children would just have to deal with getting fewer toys this year “because what we were doing with China was just unbelievable.”
“I don’t think that a beautiful baby girl needs—that’s 11 years old—needs to have 30 dolls,” he said in an interview aired Sunday. “We had a trade deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars with China.”
The U.S. and China have been slapping increasingly higher tariffs on each other since Trump unveiled “reciprocal” tariffs against multiple countries at the start of the year.
Washington and Beijing have remained defiant even as market indexes around the world plummeted over tariff uncertainty, but their icy relations may be changing soon.
Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer will meet with their Chinese counterparts in Switzerland this weekend to talk trade and economics.
The meeting was also confirmed by the Chinese embassy, claiming it had “decided to agree to engage with the #US side,” in an X post.
Based on full consideration of global expectations, China’s interests, and the appeals of the U.S. business community and consumers, #China has decided to agree to engage with the #US side. As China’s lead on China-U.S. economic and trade affairs, Vice Premier He Lifeng will hold… pic.twitter.com/2twZyYVYCk
— Chinese Embassy in US (@ChineseEmbinUS) May 7, 2025
“We have shared interests that this isn’t sustainable,” Bessent told Fox News.
Asked by Ingraham who between the two countries made the first call, Bessent said “there isn’t a first call—there are a lot of contact points over time.”
“What we’re going to do in Switzerland is we have agreed to talk, then on Saturday and Sunday we will agree what we’re going to talk about,” he explained. “My sense is that this will be about de-escalation, not about the big trade deal we have to de-escalate before we can move forward.”
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