Thirty-seven pencils

From a Donald Trump* interview with state television:

“We can — we can do things in our country. We can — you know, we used to make our own product. Would you believe it? Right? We used to make our own product. We don’t need thirty-seven pencils, we can buy two pencils — and they can be better. But you know, we went astray, with the whole thing, we went astray.”

We did go astray. I, for one, have hundreds of pencils.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

[Two pencils? It’s remotely possible that Trump* is making an oblique reference to General Pencil and Musgrave Pencil, two venerable companies that still manufacture pencils in the United States. But I doubt it. He speaks in the past tense: “we used to.” And he seems to be speaking about volume, not some number of manufacturers. Pencils, by the way, are also made in Germany and Japan, among other countries.]