Sunday Service: 5/4/25

Hello! It’s late! Or early! I don’t know when you read this — maybe like me you’re up incredibly late and pour information into your brain until you fall asleep / wake your partner up with your phone’s light and get elbowed and told to sleep! Or maybe you’re a morning person and read this on the way to work. Both are appreciated.

This week was… concerning if not particularly unbelievable. The dogs kept biting men — the dogs are of course the Executive Branch and the men are The Founding Fathers. So let’s talk about what to talk about this week.

STORY NUMBER ONE: DOLLS DOLLS DOLLS

A decade in, we kind of know how everyone is going to react to Trump things now. MAGA people will come up with a reason it’s great. Former Republicans who “don’t like Trump” will say they didn’t see it but ‘did you hear that AOC wants to make the Statue of Liberty trans?’ Centrist Democrats will binge-watch MSNBC and hop on Facebook to share a MeidasTouch meme about how it “looks like President Pumpkin is rotting LOL!!!” And leftists will write a 6-post-long thread on Bluesky about how actually what Trump is doing is a distraction to make you stop thinking about another thing he’s doing.

But I prefer the simple, straightforward assessment you might get at your local pickup game or waiting for the bus. Which is this:

Trump is losing his fastball. I don’t know if it’s because he’s super old or because the job is getting to him or because he doesn’t have a competent team around him, or if it’s all of those. But Trump is slowing down. And he’s slowing down just enough to really cause problems. It’s like a guy hustling you in three card monte (if you are young, just uhhh search for that on the internet) — if the guy’s fast, it works, if he’s juuuuust slow enough, you got him and you’re flipping the table over and letting the boots fly.

We’ll dig into a couple big Trump problems, but to me the biggest one with a giant flashing red siren on top is that he’s spent the last few days talking about dolls.

You don’t have to be a political mastermind to know that “Hey your kids deserve fewer toys” is not a winning message. And that’s before you add all the ways you’re going to be attacked — cutting taxes for businesses, for the highest earners, slashing spending on everything from Medicaid to the National Parks to Cancer Research, and then turning to the American people saying, “Hey sure everything is more expensive but it’ll teach your kids a great lesson.”

When this first dropped, I texted someone and we talked about if this would go on the Mount Rushmore of most damaging things Trump had said. To misquote Michael Jordan, “Republicans buy their kids Christmas presents too.” But Trump was not done, and with no one around him willing to curb his impulses in any way, Sunday we got this:

“A beautiful baby girl that’s 11 years old.” Huh. That’s weird, right? I mean I guess it’s how a grandpa talks when he’s squeezing your cheeks and saying he hasn’t seen you in a while? “My beautiful baby girl! Look how big you’ve gotten!” But at least we’ve zoomed in on an age for this hypothetical victim of Trump’s economic lessons.

And she has thirty dolls. Thirty. And you might be thinking, “That’s insane? Dolls at most stores start at like… $20 so we’re talking six hundred bucks of dolls?” This girl has been receiving 2.72(repeating) dolls per year her entire life, and zero of them have been lost or thrown away. This girl is getting a doll a semester! What is she doing with her life? Well, we also know she’s creative, because she has 250 pencils. Writing? Drawing? Throwing them into a popcorn ceiling because that’s fun and cool? We don’t know.

So 11YOBBG (11 year old beautiful baby girl) has 250 pencils. We know she’s dropped six hundo on dolls and clearly needs to experience a manufactured trade war recession to learn how to cherish each one. But these pencils… how much of ma and pa’s hard earned cash is supporting her lead habit? I can tell you how much:

She’s spending $40. That’s it. And these are pre-sharpened! The expensive ones! Forty bucks for enough pencils to write twelve and a half million words.¹ If you gave 11YOBBG this box of pencils she would not finish it until she was using pencils to scrawl “remember to pay mortgage” on a post-it note in her own house!

Let’s take a breath here to realize this is an insane thing to bring up twice in one week as an example of how the American people (including your voters) will need to suffer through a bad economy. Also, “dolls” and “pencils” as the two things Kids Have It Too Good On is heavy evidence that Trump’s brain is melting. He’s calling back to the 1950s when he could talk about Chinese made electronics inside basically every kids’ toy in America. Gaming consoles! Phones! Headphones! Electric scooters! Vape pens! So many way more relevant things than “dolls!” Who is this message winning over?

So of course he had to do it to ‘em again when he got asked about it on AF1 tonight.

This is the THIRD TIME this has come up for Trump. And he could — because he’s the President of the United States, and you’re flying on his plane — just say “I already talked about that,” but he has no one to keep him on message and he’s old and tired. Listen to his voice, look at his face when he gets asked — that’s the kind of incredulous face your dad gives when you tell him “it’s not called an Oriental rug anymore.”

Look at him. The tie is off, he’s ready to eat burger and do a little snooze, but he’s gotta talk to these idiots in the press because their desire to talk to him is the entire reason he has the will to live. And he can’t help diving back in to the question… but it’s changed! Lack of permanence in messaging across a day? Septuagenarian brain is that you?

11YOBBG has now morphed into “a young lady.” A 10 year old girl. A 9 year old girl. A 15 year old girl. We have really expanded the range here. But let’s say it’s the oldest example, a 15 year old. She now has 37 dolls! Which means her doll-per-year ratio has actually dropped to 2.46(repeating) dolls per year, but she’s still getting at least bi-annual additions to the doll collection. Also this 15YOGYL (15 Year Old Girl / Young Lady) has been getting dolls since birth, and still has the same taste in dolls to keep every doll since she received her inaugural 0th birthday doll delivery.

This man hates that girls have a bunch of dolls in a way that is either:

• indicative of a deep deep jealously of a sibling as a child

• a grandpa who absolutely loathes how his children parent their kids

At the very least he’s upped the Possible Doll Ceiling (PDC) to 5. It’s unclear, though, if that applies to everyone of if it’s only for 15YOGYL with a higher number of dolls according to the natural bell curve of doll delivery.

You may be going, “Why isn’t he talking about any boy toys?” If you are going that with your brain and/or mouth — stop. Whaddya doing? He is bad and gross, is it hard to figure out why he hasn’t mentioned boys? He’s gross and weird and sexist and a bad person!

My tiny prediction: Doll-Gate will break through. It’s an unforced triple error by Trump, but the entirety of next year you’re going to see those clips played in every single ad on the economy. He essentially pitched his voters “Didn’t The Grinch Have A Point?” and it is truly hard to believe that’s a winning message. If ports truly are empty, if the pain of tariffs is only beginning to hit now, if toys are so scarce that every trip to the store is like a fight for a TurboMan doll… (OH WOW A DOLL FOR BOYS! LOOK AT THAT!) this will be the out of touch moment people remember. The guy with the golden toilet told me I couldn’t buy my kids toys. We’ll see if he keeps going this week — I’m guessing yes. He’s like a Chatty Cathy doll that pulls it’s own string.

Was that over 1500 words on a crazy old man talking about dolls? HELL YES IT WAS! You think you’re gonna get that on The Daily or whatever? **** no! Ok, on to Story Number Two!

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