Toymaker Mattel, the company behind Barbie dolls, announced Tuesday it will raise the price of some of its products in order to offset the additional costs from Donald Trump’s tariffs, days after the president said children would have to make do with having fewer dolls. The California-based company, which creates some of the world’s most famous toys, imports about 20 percent of its goods from China to sell in the U.S., which accounts for nearly half of its global sales. As a result of the trade war between Washington and Beijing, which have slapped each other with tariffs of up to 145 percent, Mattel has said it plans to reduce its Chinese imports to below 15 percent by 2026. “Given the volatile macroeconomic environment and evolving U.S. tariff landscape, it is difficult to predict consumer spending and Mattel’s U.S. sales in the remainder of the year and holiday season,” the company said in a statement. In an interview Sunday on Meet the Press, Trump said: “I don’t think that a beautiful baby girl needs—that’s 11 years old—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. We had a trade deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars with China.”
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