It goes without saying that there is a great deal of Psychology going on in Donald Trump's second term. None of it is especially complicated, because the people involved are without exception clammy, low-wattage sociopaths who universally dislike and distrust each other, see their hugely consequential jobs primarily as opportunities to make short-form video content and fly on private planes, and have not let their (correct) understanding that they will be going to go to hell when they die sway them from gulping down huge foamy draughts of humiliation every single day. But if none of it and none of them are very interesting, the volatility of the visibly decaying real estate priss at the center of it all generally keeps it surprising.
For the most part, this is a matter of nausea and dread—a drawling executive digression revealing plans to invade "four or quite frankly five" new countries, the most powerful politician in the world either nodding along or nodding off as his chief health officials stammer through an endorsement of miasma theory. But sometimes it plays out as it does in this Wall Street Journal story about the president compulsively gifting pairs of Florsheim dress shoes to the underlings and supplicants that wind up sitting across from him at meetings. The Journal story quotes a woman who works in the White House saying “all the boys have them,” and another laughing that, “It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them.”
In one sense, this sort of behavior won't really be surprising to anyone who has spent time around a disinhibited and declining older person; thought processes become both less linear and much more legible in that cohort, and in this case Trump's interior progression from "bored with person talking" to "noticing that person's shoes" to "telling them to put on new shoes" is no longer interior at all. The Journal story describes Trump interrupting a lunch meeting with Tucker Carlson to start talking about "his 'incredible' new shoes" and pausing a December meeting with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to point out their "shitty shoes" before "retrieving a catalog" and getting to work on crafting a presidential solution to that issue. If this habit had in any way distracted the president from dropping bombs on foreign schools or his ongoing domestic terror campaigns, it would be much easier to laugh about it. As it stands, it's just one of those stupid things everyone gets to walk around knowing about while all the bombing and terror stuff continues. There's very little surprise left in that, either.
But there are still some rough chuckles to find, here. The Journal notes that Trump "has taken to guessing people’s shoe size in front of them," which absolutely scans; the barely implied you know, they're saying I could have been a champion-level cobbler aligns perfectly with the broader Junior Soprano of it all. The Trump Administration Difference lies in the way that the people involved have found ways to add their own personal notes of perversity, dishonesty, and scrabbling unctuous personal unpleasantness to it. In an anecdote that the Journal notes that Vance first related at an event "celebrating Kennedy Center honoree Sylvester Stallone," the Vice President talks about what happened after Trump broke out his Florsheim catalog:
A third politician was in the room—Vance didn’t name him—and Trump asked each person for their size. Rubio said 11.5, Vance 13. The third man said 7, according to Vance.
“The president kind of leans back in his chair and says, ‘You know you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size,’” Vance said.
Great stuff there, obviously; it's hard not to emit a strained and awkward laugh just reading it there on the page, and that's before you figure Vance's classic tremulous about-to-cry-at-the-Apple-store delivery style into it. But what is most admirable about the story, if that's the word, is that while it has a lot of obvious and unnecessary lies in it, the people involved all nevertheless have to abide by it. This Daily Beast story features a delightful crop of Rubio absolutely swimming in his dress shoes during a January interaction with Sen. Chuck Schumer, which I have reproduced here:
The photo wires are lousy with photos of the Secretary of State sliding around in shoes that seem aspirationally sized-up to appeal to his boss's belief that "you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size." Here he is ridin' loose in the Oval Office.
Once you start looking for it, a strange kind of visual paranoia can take hold. Do you notice anything weird in the image atop this post?
Ha ha. But I was referring to this:
Are these shoes actually too big, or is the knowledge that Marco Rubio is at least some of the time clomping around in his dad's work shoes, because he thinks it might upset his boss if he didn't, outpacing reality?
These are not the only questions raised, here, of course. Why would the Secretary of State not simply buy himself a pair of these (affordable) dress shoes in his actual size and wear those instead? Even stipulating that we already know about why he would lie about his shoe size to his boss—these people are just absolute dopes, and love to tell weird lies—why would he assume that his boss would somehow know what size shoe he is wearing? Does Rubio believe he might be fired as Secretary of State for wearing his own shoes instead of the clownier ones he received as a weird gift from his boss? Again, this is not very complicated, or very interesting: dopes, love lying for no real reason, wild humiliation fetish, et cetera, we have been over this. But while it doesn't do much to brighten the pall of our glorious new age of national disgrace, we might as well award some points for commitment to the bit, and for a residual, accidental, tragicomic bit of truth: you really can tell a lot about someone by their shoe size, or anyway by what size shoe they're willing to wear.
