When it comes to toys, Ron DeSantis isn’t playing around.
He’s still griping about price and quality.
Speaking at the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office while rolling out bonuses for police officers, DeSantis mentioned taking his kids to Walmart to shop, complaining that the toys are “a lot more expensive than they used to be.”
“And all these toys are cheap, too, like in terms of how they’re made,” DeSantis added.
The comments build on a long tradition of petulance about playthings.
In 2023, DeSantis complained about cheap Chinese toys and the arduous assembly required.
“I get frustrated because it’s Christmas time,” DeSantis said in Iowa. “We’ll get the kids these toys, right? And some of them require, like, a lot of assembly.”
“The instructions will be like two-point font and it’s not even very good stuff. And I’m just trying to find a new screwdriver and this and all that and they don’t have all the parts,” DeSantis added. “So it’s like it’s an inordinate amount of time to be able to get the kids whatever they get. And then it ends up breaking in two days anyway and it’s because it’s cheap stuff that comes from China. And it’s just frustrating, but the elites in this country have allowed it to happen.”
The Donald Trump campaign took issue with these gripes, saying DeSantis “whined about the frustration of building shoddy Chinese made toys during Christmas.” Team Trump suggested that DeSantis buy American toys and a Lego set of the White House, as that was the closest he would get to occupying it.
Of course, the complaints had been rehearsed many times before that.
During an event in South Carolina, the Governor pivoted from a discussion of banning Chinese vapes to explaining how toys from the country have wreaked havoc with DeSantis family Christmases.
“We get the kids these toys and they’re all made in China. A lot of them are and literally they break within, like, a couple of days,” DeSantis vented, calling the products “the cheapest stuff I’ve ever seen in my life.”
He explored a similar theme in Iowa in October.
“These toys made in China, literally, they break within 48 hours. It’s the cheapest stuff imaginable,” DeSantis said.
“A lot of times they don’t even have the full parts, and I burned a lot of hours putting together dollhouses and all this stuff. The worst feeling is you sink two hours into it and then there’s a part missing and you can’t complete it.”
In Texas during the Summer of 2023, DeSantis said, “This cheap stuff from China, you know, when my wife and I get our kids Christmas presents, and the stuff made in China breaks, it’s like you can’t even last two days after Christmas without the toys breaking. And so, it’s really, really cheap stuff.”
During remarks in January 2023 in Bonita Springs, the Florida Governor warned St. Nick against Chinese toys, the highlight of comments denouncing the “hostile” regime in Beijing.
“And I’m just thinking to myself like, ‘OK, you get it from China because it’s cheaper to pay.’ But if it doesn’t even last a week, then what difference does it make? So a lot of these things we got? Santa Claus may need to not do Chinese toys because let’s just make it here … honestly anywhere, but not China.”
In 2021, meanwhile, DeSantis lamented not the quality of the toys, but whether issues at ports would stop them coming in at all.
“You see all of these problems with the shipping and not being able to get goods. We don’t even know if the kids will get toys for Christmas,” the Governor said in Niceville.
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