John Oliver took issue with one of Donald Trump’s bizarre comments, saying the way he talks about young girls “makes my skin want to turn inside out.”
The president has taken to defending his tariffs by imagining a girl who might have to settle for “two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” as he put it, adding that “maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more” as a result of his policies.
“What a very weird thing to say,” Oliver responded during his opening monologue for Last Week Tonight. “It’s just another snapshot in the chaos album that is Trump having anything to do with children.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Oliver ranked Trump’s doll obsession up there with moments from his first term that included a photo of him yelling at a boy mowing the White House lawn, and the time he publicly asked a 7-year-old girl if she still believed in Santa Claus.
But Trump defending his comments in a Meet The Press interview by describing an 11-year-old as “a beautiful baby girl” freaked Oliver out on two fronts.
“Don’t call an 11-year-old that. First of all, it’s creepy And second, I promise: You call an 11-year-old girl a baby, she’ll f---ing kill you,” he said. “Also… everyone knows the breakdown of what people play with by age goes, blocks from ages 1-3, dolls from ages 3-7, and our phones from ages 8 until we die.”
But then the president kept making this case, telling reporters later on Air Force One: “All I’m saying is that you don’t—that a young lady, a 10-year-old girl, 9-year-old girl, 15-year-old girl, doesn’t need 37 dolls. She could be very happy with two or three or four or five.”
“Every single way this man refers to girls makes my skin want to turn inside out,” Oliver remarked. “That said, I also wanted to see him keep going there, just to see how many variations of ages and numbers he could cycle through.”
He then wondered aloud, if only for a moment: “Has he ever met a 15-year-old girl? That’s a dumb question. Of course he has. He was friends with Jeffrey Epstein.”
Trump, however, wasn’t wrong about the effects of his tariffs, with Mattel announcing last week that the manufacturer of Barbie and other popular toys would have to raise prices. The company does not plan to move factory jobs to the United States as a result of the tariffs.
Trump’s reaction to this also caught Oliver’s ear, with the comedian noting “that within the space of a single human sentence, Mattel switched from being a company to a country to a guy.”
As the president told reporters in an Oval Office session: “If Mattel, I don’t know, I’m not so sure—they also said, they’re the only country I heard, they said, well, we’re going to go counter, they’re going to try going someplace else, that’s OK. Let him go, and we’ll have a 100 percent tariff on his toys, and he won’t sell one toy in the United States, and that’s their biggest market.”
Trump’s insistence on referencing dolls so much allows him to frame the trade war on “things that he can pretend are frivolous,” Oliver said. “But the fact is, exports to the U.S. have already begun to slow, and that’ll soon be felt in the form of higher prices on lots of things.”
He added: “So if you’re wondering: Is Trump’s stupid trade war about to hurt a lot of people? Well, is the Pope Catholic and now also some guy named Bob from Chicago? The answer is obviously yes.”
