Make dolls great again?

Collectors say they never weren't

- 

HOW many dolls is enough dolls? This question recently entered our political discourse via President Donald Trump, who, bracing the nation for the possibility of higher-priced items as a result of his tariffs, declared that a “beautiful baby girl... that’s 11 years old” doesn’t need “30 dolls,” and that “three or four” dolls should suffice.

Try telling that to David Mansour.

“Let me have my 1 700 dolls.”

Hold up. Seventeen hundred?

Yes. Mansour, 62, has been collecting Barbies for 37 years. His happy place is his “Barbie Room,” a space in his San Diego apartment where he displays 500 of them.

Looking at all those Barbies “gives me a lot of joy,” he says. “It’s fun to have people come over, and I get to show them. I feel like a curator from a museum. I get to explain, ‘This is the Peaches and Cream Barbie. Oh, here’s the Barbie and the Rockers that were my first dolls.’” (Mansour asked this reporter about her childhood Barbies, and the interview diverged to a five-minute tangent about Animal Lovin’ Barbie, circa 1989 - which, yes, he has.) He even has a President Barbie, who he says “probably would make better decisions right now” than the current officeholder.