The Senate confirmation of Ed Martin, Trump’s loyalist pick for U.S. Attorney for D.C., looks like it may be in trouble. The Washington Post reports:

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) said he informed the White House that he opposed naming Trump’s interim appointee to a full four-year term.

“If Mr. Martin were being put forth as a U.S. attorney for any district except the district where Jan. 6 happened, the protest happened, I’d probably support him,” Tillis, who is up for reelection next year, told reporters. “But not in this district.”

Tillis sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Martin cannot afford to lose a single Republican vote. The senator has criticized the conservative lawyer’s past support for nearly 400 Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot defendants charged with assaulting police officers, and who were among the nearly 1,600 riot participants pardoned by Trump.

Well, we’ll believe it when we see it. Happy Wednesday.

(Rich) Guys and Dolls

by William Kristol

Around the world, there are wars and rumors of more war. Here at home, there’s ugly nativism and foolish protectionism and dangerous authoritarianism. But today I want to say a word about Trump and dolls.

After all, our president seems preoccupied by the topic.

At a cabinet meeting last week, President Trump sought to minimize the price-raising effect of his tariffs: “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more.”

In a subsequent interview on Meet the Press, Trump got more specific as to gender and age: “I don’t think a beautiful baby girl that’s 11 years old needs to have 30 dolls. I think they can have three dolls or four dolls.”

Then Sunday night, on Air Force One, Trump considered a still broader range of child and doll possibilities: “A young lady—a 10-year-old girl, a 9-year-old girl, a 15-year-old girl—doesn’t need to have 37 dolls. She can be very happy with 2 or 3 or 4 or 5.”

All of this hasn’t gone over so well. So last night on Fox, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent decided to leap to his boss’s defense and explain what he would say to a disappointed doll-deprived girl: “I would tell that young girl that you will have a better life now thanks to President Trump.”

Good luck to parents who try this!

Meanwhile, Democrats will continue to point out that Trump and his fellow billionaires seem perfectly comfortable having working- and middle-class families make sacrifices while the rich get their tax cuts and they make their crypto fortunes.

Republicans tend to think they can fend off this particular attack by selling those tax cuts as tax cuts for everyone. But they are clearly worried about the political effect of the Jimmy Carter-esque you-should-like-austerity vibes coming from Trump. Karl Rove said the other day on Fox that Trump sounded like Scrooge. One thing Republicans do know is that Jimmy Carter and Scrooge lose elections.

Meanwhile, whatever free-market types remain in both parties will continue to denounce the idea that the government should decide what consumers should buy.

And feminists have joined the chat, pointing out the subconscious—is it really subconscious?—stereotyping and gendering involved in Trump’s example. Why did Trump pick girls to illustrate unnecessary and frivolous spending? Boys have as many excess trucks as girls have dolls.

I think the feminists are onto something here. Rutgers University history professor Carly Goodman put it nicely: “The talking point that little girls have to settle for fewer dolls to soften the collapse of the consumer economy is genius. Women be shopping, and this whole thing smacks of gender.”

And this was the reaction of Jennifer Tabler of the University of Wyoming to Scott Bessent:

Step 1) invoke a hatred toward women as “frivolous” by proffering the example that girls will need to have less dolls

Step 2) pretend this is an actual critique/example liberals levied about tariffs

Step 3) be outraged that little girls aren’t grateful they are securing their so-called better life.

Well said.

It’s encouraging that Democrats and Republicans, free-market devotees and feminists, have all come together against Trump on dolls. Now we just need similarly broad coalitions to come together to oppose and defeat Trump on more momentous issues. But could the dolls be a start?

Inching Closer To The Brink

by Will Selber

Yesterday, the Indian Ministry of Defense launched Operation Sindoor, consisting of a series of nine airstrikes on “terrorist infrastructure” in Punjab, Pakistan, and on Pakistan’s side of the disputed Kashmir region. The strikes come two weeks after terrorists in India’s Jammu and Kashmir territory killed 26 tourists. The Indian Ministry of Defense described the strikes as “f