Trump: When footwear becomes fealty

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has a pair. So do Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick; Vice President JD Vance reportedly has four. They’re Florsheim dress shoes beloved by Donald Trump, said Andrew Egger in The Bulwark, which members of his Cabinet are slavishly wearing in the sort of “fealty” display usually associated with “totalitarian regimes.” Trump so loves the $145 black shoes, The Wall Street Journal reported last week, that he’s gifted them to “all the men in his office.” Sometimes guessing at sizes, he often gets them wrong—but, one female White House aide told the paper, “it’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them.” Photos show Cabinet members sporting identical shoes—with Rubio in particular clomping around “in outrageously large Oxfords” that must cause him blisters. The secretary of state “resembles a small child playing dress-up” in Daddy’s shoes, said Marina Hyde in The Guardian. Serving El Jefe, he and others have learned, requires “submitting utterly to his regular humiliations.”

Forcing underlings to copy your style is “a classic dictator trope,” said Miles Taylor in Defiance.news. Think of Mao Zedong and the“Mao Suit”; Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein and the thick black mustache widely aped by subordinates; the military tunic that under Joseph Stalin became “the unofficial costume” of every Soviet apparatchik. Wearing his chosen Florsheims is a “loyalty test” for Trump, and it “identifies who can be controlled.” There’s another subtext in Rubio’s oversize “clown shoes,” said Anna Cafolla in Vogue. The Journal reported that Trump asked Vance and Rubio for information before ordering their Florsheims and said, “You can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size.” Did Rubio, who gave his as 11½, inflate the number because of the myth that “correlates a man’s shoe size and his penis length?”

The Rubio photo tells us “where we are at this moment in Trump’s second administration,” said Tina Brown in her Substack newsletter. Like Little Marco, we’re trapped in an “inescapable escape room” in which a wannabe autocrat spouts “vehement ignorance,” launches wars for fun, and demands that aides, allies, corporations, the press, and foreign adversaries bend their knees to him. It’s easy to laugh at the hapless Rubio, but the grim reality is that “we are all wearing Florsheims now.”