All right, welcome back.

We begin this hour with what Donald Trump is trying to sell the American people in his second term.

The president has brought up the hardship that Americans will face multiple times now,

as the chaotic rollout of his tariffs has proven both damaging

to the American economy and deeply unpopular among the American people. Like his recent reminder

that American children might have two dolls instead of 30 this Christmas. He's perhaps using

dolls as an example here because it sounds frivolous and unimportant in the grand scheme of things,

but make no mistake, what the president is trying to sell here has nothing to do with

dolls and everything to do with the concept of austerity. And that's not something he campaigned on.

Now, for ordinary American families who work hard for every penny, reducing financial hardship

to a question of dolls is actually a bit offensive.

It's a dismissal of the daily struggle to make ends meet in a country where the cost of living

sometimes outpays his wage growth. His sweeping tariffs could cost the average household $3,800 a

year, hitting working in middle class Americans the hardest, according to a report from Yale.

When Trump talks about

dolls, what he's really saying is, get ready for some hard times. Prepare for scarcity. Prepare for prices

to spike. You probably won't be able to live the life you're currently living. And why? For what?

To bankroll his tariff and tax cuts for the riches. Why? Trump, a man who surrounds

himself with gold-plated everything is trivializing what amounts to a demand for real sacrifice from

working in middle-class Americans. Again, make no mistake, this is not about dolls or pencils. He says

you can have five pencils instead of 250 pencils.

Who's got 250 pencils? Or strollers. It's about deliberately making life harder for millions of

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