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Hello, good morning everyone. This is Playbooks managing editor and author Jack Blanchard,

and it is Monday, May the 5th, the start of another week in Washington. I am here with White

House Bureau Chief Dashabh Burns to talk about everything that's driving the day today. Hello,

Dasha, how you you doing? Good morning.

Happy Monday to you and to everyone. There's a few things going on this week, as always in D.C. Donald

Trump is having some event at the White House this afternoon where we think is going to be talking about the NFL.

You know he likes talking about sports and bringing that into politics. The Treasury Secretary is over in California, speaking at a conference about the economy.

That will be interesting as well, given we know that the economy is always a story. And then Donald Trump, after some sort of dinner tonight, one of these MAGA-ink things, I don't really know what they are, but they sound a bit weird. Do you know what they are, Dasher, a MAGA-ink dinner? Do not have the details on that one now, but I'm sure we'd all like to be a fly on the wall.

The economy is by far the biggest story of Donald Trump's presidency so far, given what

happened on Liberation Day and afterwards. We've seen the stock market improve quite a lot,

Dasha, since those initial massive dramatic losses. But Donald Trump, the thing that just amazes me about this president is he just comes out with things that are just clearly not the line that you're supposed to say, right? I mean, you're used to this. You've followed this guy around. You've seen this. Time and time again. Politicians are supposed to stay on message and stay like, right, this is the line on

tariffs is good for money. Well, and his advisors have been. Like, I've been getting all these messages from allies and supporters sending me the good headlines about the stock market, about unemployment numbers, about jobs numbers. But that is not how the president has been talking about it, at least not the most notable way that he's been talking about it. He says that stuff as well, but this stuff about the dolls.

So yesterday, uh, Sunday, he's on, dolls and pencils. Dolls and pencils, the quotes are just unbelievable. For those of you that we had something better to do on his Sunday than watched Donald Trump on NBC News. First of all, shame on you because it was really interesting. Second of all, like, listen to these quotes. I don't think that a

beautiful baby girl, that's 11 years old, that baby girl needs to have 30 dolls. I think they can have

three dolls or four dolls because what we were doing with China was just unbelievable. And then he

goes on to say that they can have, they don't need 250 pencils, they can have five. This is the

President of the United States telling us how many

pencils and dolls children are allowed under his economy. What do you make of this?

Well, look, as someone who did not have 250 pencils growing up, I do understand the sentiment.

No, look, I think that he is trying to do what a lot of advisors had wanted

him to do early on, which is try to explain to people that he is doing something major to

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