Walk a mile in Trump’s $399 sneakers
They always say that to understand a man, you must walk a mile in his shoes. Well, here comes Donald Trump to a tennis shoe trade show with 1,000 pairs of them. As soon as you saw that the former president was putting the “con” in Sneaker Con Philadelphia, you knew you couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
You pull the Trump sneakers out of their shoe box with the gold tissue paper and the enormous TRUMP on the top. They are just as garish up close — indeed, more so, like a pimple in high definition. They include oversize red areas and have been designed in a confusing way, like the current legislative map of North Carolina. They look as though a lesser Midas tripped over a pair of Yeezys.
You lace them on. You were expecting to immediately feel different in your Trump Sneakers.
Maybe you would be able to hear birds speak, and the things the birds would say would be overwhelmingly positive about Donald Trump. Maybe you would feel a bone spur shoot out of your foot.
But, so far, nothing. “My family members would do a better job running the Republican National Committee than those currently in charge,” you suddenly say. But that’s a standard thing to think. You crave a milkshake, but that’s also normal.
“Let’s do a felony,” you say to nobody in particular. When are the darn shoes going to kick in?
You ask for a picture of Mara-Lago, and when you see it, you feel tears start to come to your eyes. Nothing has ever seemed so beautiful, or worth so much money. You can’t even put it into dollars. It would be like trying to put a price on Jupiter or the sun! You have forgotten that Tiffany Trump exists.
You look around at your associates. Before, if you had to describe them, you would have said “savory,” but now you would say the opposite. Was Rudy Giuliani there when you put the shoes on? He looks worse for wear and says you owe him millions of dollars.
Oddly, the number of people in the room seems to have been cut in half. Can that be right? You count again. No, it’s right. There are your friends, and there are also women, who are something different and less than people. “Shoes,” you say to them, pointing. Women love shoes!
Before they answer (have their voices always been this irritating?) you feel someone tugging at your sleeve. He is extremely unsavory and has a big dossier full of ideas, a large section of which involves putting immigrants into camps and deploying troops to the states that disagree.
You glance at your bank accounts to see if people are sending you money. People should be sending you money, just for being you — and also because the government is trying to persecute you. (The government says laws apply to you just like they apply to other people, the worst form of persecution you can think of).
“Take them off!” a friend calls to you, seemingly from a thousand miles away. Before they even begin to work?
This is when your phone starts to ring. “You’re being indicted,” the caller says. Your net worth, which fluctuates depending on how you are feeling on a given day, suddenly plummets. Is it possible, you briefly wonder, that you are getting net worth and self-worth confused?
“It will be fine,” you hear yourself saying, “because I am worth untold millions — or I was, until you brought me down like this.”
The indictments start pouring in, thickly, one after the next. It must be the shoes! You can’t remember being indicted all the time before the shoes.
You try to take the shoes off, but they won’t go. You struggle and push and yank at the laces, but they just pull tighter and tighter. You strain and strain and then — pop! The laces fly off.
These are not well-constructed, it turns out.
Your feet emerge. They are sweaty. You are panting. You look around for your associates. You look around for the man with the dossier. You check your phone for calls. Nothing.
“Am I being indicted?” you ask. “Lots of times, for a variety of offenses?”
“What?” your friend says. She looks concerned. “Are you okay?” “No,” you say. “Absolutely not.” But when you get home, you cannot bring yourself to throw the shoes away. You will just secrete them away somewhere — somewhere secure, somewhere prying eyes will never see them and the public will come to no harm.
The beautiful Mar-a-Lago, you find yourself thinking, in perhaps one of its beautiful bathrooms?
And so you realize that it is too late, and already you have walked a mile too far.