Trump doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does.
I’ll say this for the president: He’s enough of a shoe guy to have avoided truly egregious crimes against good taste here. (For once!)
His team is wearing oxfords, the appropriate choice to accompany a suit and tie. He steered clear of hideous Frankenshoes, which pair a dress-shoe upper with a chunky rubber sneaker sole for comfort. And he didn’t get suckered by steeply priced but poorly made fashion-house footwear that commands an exorbitant premium based on brand name alone.
If you’re going to skimp on quality, you should save a buck in doing so. That’s what he did by opting for Florsheim.
Being gifted shoes by the most powerful man in the world and opening the box to discover Florsheims is like being gifted a watch, expecting it to be a Rolex, and finding a Daniel Wellington instead.
It makes sense that Trump would be attached to the brand, though. He’s a creature of nostalgia, and back in the day Florsheim was a pillar of quality American shoemaking. When my mother took me shopping for shoes as a kid, she looked for Florsheims. When adult men of that era went looking for something beautiful, stylish, and buy-it-for-life durable, they landed on Florsheim Imperials in shell cordovan. Those shoes were so well made that you can find them today on eBay, decades old yet often looking brand new, still worth hundreds of dollars second-hand.
Like America itself, the Florsheim of 2026 is not the Florsheim of Donald Trump’s, or my, youth.
Most production moved overseas years ago to Cambodia, China, India, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic, per the company’s Canadian website, making its wares an odd choice for a protectionist “America First” White House. (Icing on the cake: Florsheim’s parent company is apparently suing the administration over tariffs.) A quick search of its current catalog reveals nothing available in shell cordovan. The price tag alone should have clued Trump into the fact that Florsheim ain’t what it used to be: There’s no such thing as high-quality American-made footwear priced at less than $150, and any real shoe guy would know that.
“Maybe he knows and he’s just cheap,” you say. Maybe—but, given that he’s squeezed $1.4 billion and counting out of his courtiers since returning to office, I’m inclined to believe he’d be willing to pony up a little more than $145 for decent shoes. My guess is that he simply doesn’t know better. He thinks Florsheim is still the Florsheim of 1975 (when $145 was top-dollar for a solid pair of kicks) and that he’s doing his deputies a favor by making them swap out their Louis Vuittons for this husk of a brand.
That’s him all over. He thinks he knows things and then ends up looking ridiculous when his assumptions meet reality. He thought a decapitation strike on Iran’s leadership would cause the regime to cave in or quickly sue for peace. Wrong. He seems to have thought Gen. Dan Caine’s pre-war warnings about America burning through its air-defense munitions could safely be ignored, trusting that the world’s greatest military would find some easy way to counter the asymmetric threat from Iranian drones. Wrong. He obviously thought that the Strait of Hormuz would remain open once U.S. and Israeli jets were poised to punish Iran from the sky if regime goons dared to close it. Oh so wrong.
Now he has J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio wearing shoes that cost less than some Nikes because he thought their previous pairs—which in all probability were better than Florsheims—were comparatively “s—y.” Wrong.
The Trump Cabinet doesn’t have its act together.
When I asked my editor why she notices nice shoes on a man, she compared it to him wearing a clean, unwrinkled shirt. It’s not the shoes per se that make an impression, it’s what they say about his basic competence and whether he’s worth investing in.
Is he clean? Well-groomed? Capable of putting together an outfit? Is he willing to make an effort to present himself well and possessed of the discernment needed to succeed at the task? Showing up to a date in a T-shirt and Vans signals low energy, poor taste, or both. Showing up in a crisp OCBD and pair of Alden 975s in Color 8 suggests a man who has his act together. (Emphasis on “suggests.” I own both and rarely have my act together.)
The fact that Trump and his Cabinet can’t dial in on something as simple as shoe-sizing doesn’t scream, “We have our act together.”
Sizing shoes is trickier than it sounds, in fairness, especially in an age when most purchases are made online with best guesses about fit instead of in store after measurements. Even if you aim for reliable sizing by doing most of your buying from the same brand, it’s easy to end up confounded by the variety of “lasts” (i.e,. foot shapes) manufacturers use for their models. Scroll through Carmina’s menu of lasts and see how confident you are that you’d nail a fit on the first try, bearing in mind that rolling the dice on an order there will easily run you $500 or more.
It’s easy to miss the mark on sizing. But, being a sentient adult, I’ve never missed so badly that I ended up looking like a 6-year-old wearing my dad’s shoes, which is how Rubio and Duffy look in their footwear.
I don’t think stupidity is to blame for that, though. I suspect it’s something worse.
It’s not that Rubio and Duffy don’t know their shoe size. Nor is it that Trump’s gophers are incapable of placing orders in the correct size at Florsheim, a task that a reasonably intelligent chimp could be taught to carry out. My guess is that, whenever the president asks his toadies what size they wear, they deliberately inflate the number to impress him with how big their feet supposedly are.
No joke: According to the Journal, at the same December meeting at which Trump asked Vance and Rubio about their shoes, he reportedly observed, “You know you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size.” In an administration of postliberal cretins consumed with “strength” and machismo, what more humiliating admission could there be than telling the boss you’re not well-endowed?
Thus it was that Rubio, a man who stands 5-foot-9 or 5-10 and whom the president once famously derided as “Little Marco,” reportedly told Trump he takes a size 11.5 shoe. And for some reason, instead of quietly swapping out the gifted pair for an appropriately sized replacement from Florsheim, the secretary of state evidently feels obliged to walk around in them. (Is he afraid the president will make him take them off to check the size?) If I were Volodymyr Zelensky looking to buy some goodwill from the White House on the cheap, I’d airlift a set of tongue pads and orthotics to the State Department immediately.
Cabinet members wearing wrong-sized shoes on purpose is what happens in an outfit that doesn’t have its act together. Already so far in the war, which is less than two weeks old, the administration has been surprised by Israel’s choice of targets, by the sudden spike in oil prices last Sunday night, by Iran’s decision to attack its oil-producing Arab neighbors, and of course by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Yesterday Sen. Chris Murphy emerged from a classified briefing claiming that the White House had no plan to reopen the strait, one of the most foreseeable and economically ruinous consequences of the conflict.
That smells like Democratic hyperbole—until you read the reporting today about how grim America’s tactical options have become. One source told Reuters that the U.S. might need to take control of Iran’s coast somehow before oil tankers can safely resume transit, as there are too many ships bottled up and too few U.S. vessels available for military escorts through the strait to solve the problem. Even if escorts were feasible, The Economist notes, they’d be fabulously expensive and would proceed too slowly to avert a major oil supply shock.
Oh, and if a tanker is attacked and its cargo spills out into the Strait, that alone could impede commercial traffic for months.
When you’re stalled in a gas line this summer, wondering how you ended up there, think of Marco Rubio parading around in his dad-sized shoes at the president’s behest.
Trump’s Cabinet is too cowardly to resist his stupidest ideas.
Still, if we’re searching for a grand lesson from l’affaire Florsheim about how this administration operates, there’s an obvious one I’ve overlooked.
It may be that the president’s deputies understand that Florsheims are trash, that he’s foolish to gift them something as size-sensitive as shoes, and that they look like dopes all wearing the same model of ill-fitting footwear. The problem isn’t that they don’t have their act together. The problem is that they’re part of an authoritarian cult of personality and that such things are governed by very particular rules.
Never be the first to stop clapping for the leader; never tell him his idea to wing it in a war that could wreck the global economy is stupid; and never tell him “no thanks” when he hands you a pair of shoes. Rubio et al. aren’t wearing their Florsheims because they lack taste or because they enjoy the feel of sliding around on a midsole that’s two sizes too big. They’re wearing them because they’re cowardly suck-ups who are afraid to tell their boss no.
“It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them,” one White House official candidly told the Journal of Cabinet members’ habit of donning their shoes around Trump. Everything is a loyalty test in this third-world political culture, apparel very much included. From the famous MAGA cap to Republicans’ blue-suit-red-tie solidarity attire outside one of Trump’s courthouse appearances to the ear bandages at the 2024 Republican convention to the Florsheim mafia in the West Wing, the president has always cultivated visual displays of devotion to accompany the rhetorical slobbering.
Not all examples of his Cabinet feeling obliged to egg on his dumbest impulses are as trivial as bad shoes, though, needless to say. “Inside the administration, some officials are growing pessimistic about the lack of a clear strategy to finish the war,” the New York Times reported on Tuesday. “But they have been careful not to express that directly to the president, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success.” Those two sentences could be airdropped verbatim into any news report about the Kremlin officials’ attitude toward Vladimir Putin with respect to Ukraine.
Cowardice explains why we might soon be paying $12 a gallon for gas and why the most powerful people on Earth are wearing footwear that even casual sartorial hobbyists wouldn’t be caught dead in. And so it’s pointless for anyone to offer the president and his team recommendations on how to improve their shoe game, which is about blind obedience far more than it is about shoes.
Although, because I know a little something about the subject, I feel obliged to try.
Do better.
There are a few obvious alternatives to Florsheim for those who want something made in the USA. and don’t want to wear crap.
One is Alden, widely regarded as the last great American shoemaker and a favorite of Twitter’s Menswear Guy. I own eight pairs, five in shell cordovan and one in “rare” Ravello shell that isn’t part of the company’s regular catalog. Aldens would cost Trump anywhere from $700 to $1,000 per pair, and he might have to wait a while for his order, as production is frequently backlogged, especially for handsewn models. But I suppose he could call up the factory and threaten to tariff them if they don’t expedite his purchase.
And before you say “he can’t tariff an American company,” let me remind you it’s his belief that he can tariff any ol’ thing he wants.
The problem with Alden (besides the price) is that it’s a standard of Ivy League style and this administration despises the Ivy League, as Ivy League graduates Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth frequently remind us. So the president could opt instead for Wisconsin’s Allen Edmonds, another heritage American brand whose iconic “Park Avenue” cap-toe oxford would fit right in inside the Oval Office. I have it in—what else?—shell cordovan and wear it to weddings.
Allen Edmonds is famous for offering shoes in virtually every size that a human foot can realistically be. If you like seeing Rubio in kicks that are two sizes too long, imagine the joy of watching him waddle around in shoes two sizes too wide. “Size 11.5—triple E, sir. I have serious girth.”
If I wanted to spend Allen Edmonds-level money on a shoe, though, I’d opt for Grant Stone. They’re known chiefly for boots, of which I have three pairs (two in cordovan, one in kangaroo), but their loafers are very popular with shoe guys and they’ve built out a nice catalog of oxfords and derbies. They’re American-owned and the quality is excellent; the only catch is that they’re made in—gulp—China.
Then again, that may be where the Florsheims are coming from.
In that case, if the White House is willing to dispense with “buy American” altogether, I’ve got the perfect suggestion: Vass.
Vass shoes are comparable in price to Allen Edmonds and Grant Stone yet are handmade, a preposterously good value that’s made them famous among shoe nerds. How do they manage it, you ask? Well, they’re based in comparatively affordable Budapest, Hungary—ground zero of Western postliberalism thanks to the ur-Trump, Viktor Orbán, who’s fighting for his political life at the moment. Nothing would be more sartorially appropriate for the president and his Cabinet as it goes about wrecking the constitutional order than outfitting everyone in pairs of “Budapesters” from Vass. It would be like giving all of their feet a fashy haircut.
If our clowns are going to wear shoes, they should at least be good ones.
