Let Them Eat Dolls

The billionaires and meme-coin merchants have lots of opinions on how many Barbies your daughter should be grateful to have.

The Senate confirmation of Ed Martin, Trump’s loyalist pick for U.S. Attorney for D.C., looks like it may be in trouble. The Washington Post reports:

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) said he informed the White House that he opposed naming Trump’s interim appointee to a full four-year term.

“If Mr. Martin were being put forth as a U.S. attorney for any district except the district where Jan. 6 happened, the protest happened, I’d probably support him,” Tillis, who is up for reelection next year, told reporters. “But not in this district.”

Tillis sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Martin cannot afford to lose a single Republican vote. The senator has criticized the conservative lawyer’s past support for nearly 400 Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot defendants charged with assaulting police officers, and who were among the nearly 1,600 riot participants pardoned by Trump.

Well, we’ll believe it when we see it. Happy Wednesday.

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(Photo: Shutterstock.)

(Rich) Guys and Dolls

by William Kristol

Around the world, there are wars and rumors of more war. Here at home, there’s ugly nativism and foolish protectionism and dangerous authoritarianism. But today I want to say a word about Trump and dolls.

After all, our president seems preoccupied by the topic.

At a cabinet meeting last week, President Trump sought to minimize the price-raising effect of his tariffs: “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more.”

In a subsequent interview on Meet the Press, Trump got more specific as to gender and age: “I don’t think a beautiful baby girl that’s 11 years old needs to have 30 dolls. I think they can have three dolls or four dolls.”

Then Sunday night, on Air Force One, Trump considered a still broader range of child and doll possibilities: “A young lady—a 10-year-old girl, a 9-year-old girl, a 15-year-old girl—doesn’t need to have 37 dolls. She can be very happy with 2 or 3 or 4 or 5.”

All of this hasn’t gone over so well. So last night on Fox, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent decided to leap to his boss’s defense and explain what he would say to a disappointed doll-deprived girl: “I would tell that young girl that you will have a better life now thanks to President Trump.”

Good luck to parents who try this!

Meanwhile, Democrats will continue to point out that Trump and his fellow billionaires seem perfectly comfortable having working- and middle-class families make sacrifices while the rich get their tax cuts and they make their crypto fortunes.

Republicans tend to think they can fend off this particular attack by selling those tax cuts as tax cuts for everyone. But they are clearly worried about the political effect of the Jimmy Carter-esque you-should-like-austerity vibes coming from Trump. Karl Rove said the other day on Fox that Trump sounded like Scrooge. One thing Republicans do know is that Jimmy Carter and Scrooge lose elections.

Meanwhile, whatever free-market types remain in both parties will continue to denounce the idea that the government should decide what consumers should buy.

And feminists have joined the chat, pointing out the subconscious—is it really subconscious?—stereotyping and gendering involved in Trump’s example. Why did Trump pick girls to illustrate unnecessary and frivolous spending? Boys have as many excess trucks as girls have dolls.

I think the feminists are onto something here. Rutgers University history professor Carly Goodman put it nicely: “The talking point that little girls have to settle for fewer dolls to soften the collapse of the consumer economy is genius. Women be shopping, and this whole thing smacks of gender.”

And this was the reaction of Jennifer Tabler of the University of Wyoming to Scott Bessent:

Step 1) invoke a hatred toward women as “frivolous” by proffering the example that girls will need to have less dolls

Step 2) pretend this is an actual critique/example liberals levied about tariffs

Step 3) be outraged that little girls aren’t grateful they are securing their so-called better life.

Well said.

It’s encouraging that Democrats and Republicans, free-market devotees and feminists, have all come together against Trump on dolls. Now we just need similarly broad coalitions to come together to oppose and defeat Trump on more momentous issues. But could the dolls be a start?

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Inching Closer To The Brink

by Will Selber

Yesterday, the Indian Ministry of Defense launched Operation Sindoor, consisting of a series of nine airstrikes on “terrorist infrastructure” in Punjab, Pakistan, and on Pakistan’s side of the disputed Kashmir region. The strikes come two weeks after terrorists in India’s Jammu and Kashmir territory killed 26 tourists. The Indian Ministry of Defense described the strikes as “focused, measured, and non-escalatory,” a statement that underscores India’s purported intention to target specific terrorist groups without escalating the conflict. It declared: “justice is served.”

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who is nominally in control of the Pakistani military, called the attacks “cowardly” and warned that Pakistan would give a “befitting reply” to the “act of war.” Pakistan claimed that eight people, including two children, were killed and 35 people injured as a result of the Indian strikes.

Despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the United Nations Secretary General, and Chinese and Russian diplomats all urging restraint, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi targeted not only Pakistani-controlled territory in Kashmir but also targets associated with the terrorist groups Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan—moves that Pakistani Chief of Army Staff General Syed Asim Munir, who more than anyone will shape his country’s response, will likely see as escalatory. Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Service Intelligence has long-standing ties to both groups and often uses them to attack India while maintaining a patina of deniability.

Although Pakistani-affiliated social media sites boasted of shooting down multiple Indian aircraft, the Pakistani military will likely struggle to blunt a sustained Indian military operation (should one take place) as they suffer from serious and persistent logistical issues. While Pakistan’s leaders put on a show of defiance, Pakistani society appears wary of another military conflict, as it still bears the scars of the political turmoil that landed former Prime Minister Imran Khan in prison. A broader war between two nuclear-armed rivals could be exceptionally bloody: Pakistan is not in a position to effectively blunt an Indian offensive without using its limited nuclear inventory, which could potentially escalate the conflict to a catastrophic level.

So far, the Indian retaliation has been limited to airstrikes, which are much less likely than ground operations to trigger a Pakistani nuclear response. It appears that for now, both sides are seeking to limit escalation.

But that might be harder for Pakistan than for India. Pakistani military officials will likely signal a proportional response to India’s airstrikes, but they likely don’t have total control of their terror groups, who operate with various degrees of autonomy in Kashmir. Pakistan has long used terror groups against both the United States and India and largely escaped any accountability for it.

For decades, Pakistan has used jihadist proxies as an asymmetric advantage against India. Now they may be an asymmetric liability.

In many ways, Modi’s position is like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s: He has to respond forcefully to the terrorist attack and he has to prove that he’s doing something once and for all. But there’s also no clear way to do that. Both men’s nationalist political bases are likely to encourage them to pursue more extreme policies rather than to moderate. At least in Modi’s case, the persistent threat of nuclear weapons could have a moderating influence. Let’s hope so.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Donald Trump’s Information Warfare Against America… Federal data used to be economic jet fuel. Now, much of it is either gone or weaponized, reports JILL LAWRENCE.

• Trump Says He Won’t Fire the Fed Chair. But Could He? If SCOTUS decides members of independent agencies can be fired at will, the implications could be huge—including for the Federal Reserve, writes CHARLES BLANCHARD.

• Pope Donald the First? On Just Between Us, ANDREW EGGER joins MONA CHAREN to discuss the Melania crypto scam (it’s even worse than you imagine), Pope Donald, and the voters’ thermostatic reaction to Trump.

• The Comprehensive Guide to Trump’s Putin Fetish… Donald Trump’s obsession with Vladimir Putin is deeper—and creepier—than you think, observes WILL SALETAN on Bulwark+ Takes.

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Quick Hits

I SPY, WITH MY LITTLE EYE… A TUNDRA: Sometimes you read an article and think to yourself, What kind of world are we actually living in? Behold the following from the Wall Street Journal on the U.S. intel agencies stepping up their spying activity in Greenland.

Several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a “collection emphasis message” to intelligence-agency heads last week. They were directed to learn more about Greenland’s independence movement and attitudes on American resource extraction on the island.

The classified message asked agencies, whose tools include surveillance satellites, communications intercepts and spies on the ground, to identify people in Greenland and Denmark who support U.S. objectives for the island.

The directive is one of the first concrete steps Trump’s administration has taken toward fulfilling the president’s often-stated desire to acquire Greenland.

Certainly there are national security implications in and around Greenland that would require a U.S. intel component. But actively ramping up the spying on a NATO ally for the purposes of trying to facilitate its annexation is a whole other bag.

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SEVERANCE MEETS REAL LIFE: Speaking of befuddling news, the Office of Personnel Management put out a press release this week saying it was “proud to join agencies across the federal government in celebrating Public Service Recognition Week, which runs from May 5–11, 2025.” According to the release, “This annual event honors the dedication of public servants who work every day to improve the lives of the American people—from processing veterans’ benefits to defending our national security.”

I’m sure OPM employees are just overwhelmed by the kindness and appreciation being shown to them by the same Trump administration that has gleefully decimated their ranks, destroyed their livelihoods and mentally terrorized them at work. Will there be fun melon bars involved?

If you’re at one of these events honoring public servants and just can’t really process what is going on, drop us a note. Include a picture or some color. We have a very secure tips line!

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THE NAMING OF GULFS: Donald Trump is turning out to be a real sicko for renaming bodies of water. Dude just can’t get enough. Here’s the AP:

President Donald Trump plans to announce while on his trip to Saudi Arabia next week that the United States will now refer to the Persian Gulf as the Arabian Gulf or the Gulf of Arabia, according to two U.S. officials.

Arab nations have pushed for a change to the geographic name of the body of water off the southern coast of Iran, while Iran has maintained its historic ties to the gulf.

The Persian/Arabian Gulf question is a more nuanced one than the capricious “Gulf of America” decision uncorked by the White House earlier this year. While the name “Persian Gulf” has a longer pedigree, many Middle East countries have long used the alternate title; as the AP notes, the U.S. military has for years defaulted to “Arabian Gulf” as well.

Trump is clearly captivated by the names of things. As he pursues closer ties with the Arab world, it’s no real surprise he’d throw his weight behind the Arabs’ preferred name for the gulf too.

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