By admin 
I awoke in Washington on a recent Thursday the proud owner of a pair of Donald Trump’s favorite shoes.
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To backpedal for a moment: While even the most well-intentioned president can’t fix everything that comes across his desk, this one apparently spotted a problem beneath his that he could do something about. Apparently not content to simply remake the White House and the nation’s capital in his own image, Trump has also cast an eye to the feet of the people who work there.
“You guys have shitty shoes,” Trump allegedly told Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the Oval Office last December, before retrieving a catalog and picking out four new pairs for each of them. The president’s footwear of choice is Florsheim, a 134-year-old brand he seems to have fallen in love with after searching for a more comfortable option for himself. In the world of men’s fashion, Florsheim is a widely available and decidedly midtier option; it typically retails for about $145. Trump, known for both gilded excess and cheapness, has apparently been paying for the shoes himself and gifting them to his (male) aides and allies. According to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the haberdasher in chief’s podiatric largesse, recipients include Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Communications Director Steven Cheung, and Fox News host Sean Hannity. “Seems to work out pretty well,” Trump told Fox in March about his habit of resoling the men in his orbit. “And now they look all spiffy and nice.”
Those fortunate enough to get a presidential rebrand appear anxious to show their appreciation. “It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them,” one White House aide told the Journal. But to invert the old saw, the shoe doesn’t always fit. Earlier this year, Rubio was photographed on Capitol Hill wearing a new-looking pair of black Oxfords in which his feet were positively swimming.
All of this gave my editors an idea: send me to D.C. wearing a pair of Don’s preferred wing tips. The goal was to put my feet on the line to explore one of the stranger ways in which this president’s predilections have warped American governance—and maybe his closest aides’ toes too. And as a former Washingtonian not unfamiliar with the capital’s sometimes-warped sidewalks and often-warped politicos, I also just wanted to take the Florsheims for a spin around my old city.
But what began as something close to cosplay ended up as a daylong, 10-mile parable of Trump’s presidency and the state of the Republican Party in 2026. During my trek, I spoke to GOP lawmakers who were willing to delicately mock Trump’s footwear—yet have done much less to constrain his more consequential flights of fancy, like unleashing troops in U.S. cities or starting a war with Iran. I met members of a Republican staffer class torn between pining for Florsheims as a status marker and scorning the president’s middlebrow taste. And besides chafed heels, blisters, and toe-pinching soreness, I came away with an insight about what it means that Trump’s Cabinet this time around is a much younger, greener, bro-ier, more shamelessly sycophantic, and more true-believing bunch than his first. After experiencing firsthand (firstfoot?) the pain some of them may be enduring as the price of loyalty, I think it’s clear that one reason Trump’s second term feels so different is that none of this iteration of strivers he has surrounded himself with can say no to their boss—not on policy, not on Iran, and not even on the entirely practical question of what to put on their feet.
Since I lack direct access to the president’s munificence, my shoes came instead from a men’s clothing store near where I live in Boston. From a wall display of all the Florsheims a mover and shaker in Trump’s Washington could want, I picked out a lustrous pair of black cap-toed Oxfords that closely resembled the ones Trump and several top aides were photographed wearing in Davos earlier this year. Sizing was trickier. Trump has reportedly taken to guesstimating the dimensions of his aides’ feet as a kind of parlor trick, a talent that Rubio’s Capitol Hill clown shoes suggest needs some work. (Asked about the shoes during a congressional hearing this week, Rubio claimed that the Florsheims Trump gave him “are actually pretty good, they fit fine.”) But Vance’s account of the president interrupting important Oval Office business to ask his subordinates for their shoe size implies that at least some of the pairs he has gifted fit better. I decided to split the difference with a roomy pair that left a subtle gap behind my heel.
A couple of days later, I was in our nation’s seat of power, the Florsheims in question laced firmly onto my feet. The rest of my getup combined other MAGA-coded sartorial symbols meant to replicate the experience of a Trump Cabinet member in swampy Washington: blue suit, white dress shirt, and obligatory red tie. As I set off, the shoes emitted a peppy clip-clop and a satisfying groan of distressed leather with each step.
My odyssey began in Navy Yard, a recently built-up D.C. neighborhood where the Transportation Department is headquartered. Its leader, Sean Duffy, is on the younger and less experienced end of Trump’s Cabinet; before serving in Congress, Duffy was a cast member on The Real World: Boston. He allegedly owns a pair of Trump-gifted Florsheims, which I’d hoped to spot him sporting. Alas, I didn’t see him or his shoes. As it turns out, Duffy may not have been in Washington that morning at all. A few weeks after my visit, he told Fox News that he has spent part of the past several months traveling the country for a reality show he’s making to celebrate America’s 250th birthday. Filming a road show like that might not require Florsheims. But Trump, a former reality TV star bent on turning the nation’s semiquincentennial into a celebration of himself, presumably appreciates the effort.
Next I made for Congress, whose storied halls seemed like a good test of the Florsheims’ resilience. Fishing for my press badge, I spotted a trio of anti-Trump protesters holding handmade signs outside an entrance to the House of Representatives. One of them, a 69-year-old retired pharmaceutical microbiologist from Maryland named Robert Gerber, told me he once sold Florsheims at a suburban mall while attending college at Drexel University. It seemed like a minor victory for our civic fabric that Gerber could disagree with the president so fundamentally yet find common ground over footwear.
Once free of the 80-degree heat and clear of the Capitol building’s magnetometers, I beelined past sweaty tour groups in search of lawmakers who might own a pair of shoes from the president. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who trundled past in a wheelchair pushed by aides, seemed an unlikely suspect; besides doing less walking these days, the former GOP leader has long since fallen out of step with the president. But the more I traversed the Capitol’s marbled floors, the more the shoes felt like an emblem of the simultaneous thanklessness and fecklessness of being a Republican member of Congress in 2026.
“They look very nice on you,” said Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas, who voted in lockstep with the president’s position last year but told me he hasn’t gotten a pair of shoes in return. Boozman prefers “something comfortable” anyway, he said. Rubber stamp, meet rubber sole. “I like ’em!” enthused Sen. John Cornyn of Texas when I pointed to my feet. At the time, it seemed like solicitousness; in retrospect, coming from a legislator who once posted a picture of himself reading The Art of the Deal, he might have been trying to flatter POTUS instead. Still, Cornyn admitted, Trump’s Florsheim “proselytizing hasn’t extended to me.” It turned out Trump’s support didn’t either; last month, Cornyn lost out on the president’s endorsement, then lost his primary to a MAGA-aligned challenger. The sand-colored, cream-soled shoes Cornyn wore during his concession speech, a composite of an Oxford and a sneaker, looked a lot like the ones he’d been wearing when we spoke.
I found other Florsheim-less Republicans who have crossed the president more directly. “Noooo,” Sen. Thom Tillis said in his North Carolina drawl when I asked if Trump had given him a pair. Tillis, who opted not to seek reelection after clashing with the president last year, was at the time still threatening to blockade Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Reserve if the administration didn’t drop a nakedly political criminal probe into then-Chair Jerome Powell.
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Other senators were less interested in indulging me. Lindsey Graham, who is reportedly among the Trump confidants to receive the fabled footwear, slipped away before I could see what was on his feet (and his office didn’t respond when I asked). James Lankford, of Oklahoma, quickly confirmed that he hasn’t gotten a pair from the president before scampering up a set of stairs labeled “Senators Only.” “Shoes?” Bernie Sanders replied incredulously, when I approached him outside a Senate elevator, before shooing me away.
Trump’s obsession with Florsheim, which isn’t known for women’s footwear, aptly embodies the majority-male and explicitly patriarchal administration the president has built around himself. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a moderate Alaska Republican, laughed when I asked if he’d gifted her any shoes. As of last fall, just 16 percent of Trump’s Senate-confirmed nominees were women. Four of them—Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Tulsi Gabbard, and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer—have left or will soon leave the administration, each quickly replaced with a man. How might Trump even outfit a high-status woman in his orbit? “That’s a very interesting question!” Murkowski threw over her shoulder as she walked away. (The White House didn’t respond to my questions about Trump’s shoe-bestowing habits—at least not intentionally. In an email that seemed intended for his boss, a spokesman wrote, “Feel like this is an ignore unless you feel otherwise …”)
But even some of the Republicans who have put their foot down on Trump’s footwear haven’t always stood up to his more damaging impulses. Tillis, who told me that the president’s beloved Florsheims might be a little too “flashy” for the Senate, supplied the decisive vote to confirm Hegseth, a former Fox host, as secretary of defense. And despite her reputation for bucking the president, Murkowski ended up ensuring passage of Trump’s signature legislation, which stripped billions of dollars from Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
When it came to shoes, though, Murkowski showed little interest in toeing Trump’s line. “Absolutely anything but a high heel,” she said when I asked what she prefers to walk around the Capitol. “And it seems like there’s an awful lot of high, high heels in the White House. I don’t know how they do it. They would not last in the United States Senate, I can guaran-damn-tee you that.”
After a couple of miles spent crisscrossing the Capitol complex, I was starting to see Murkowski’s point. The pad of my left foot felt as if I’d stepped on a sanding belt. With each stride, I squirmed deeper into the Florsheims’ tapered toes in a vain effort to spare my chafing heels. But I gamely soldiered back into the sunlight and onto the pathways that line the National Mall, each ginger step kicking up dust. As I ambled past groups doing yoga and vacationing families lounging on the grass, pain started to radiate through my ankles and up my shinbones before settling uncomfortably in my hips. Still, at least my costume was cutting the right figure. “Looking sharp, buddy!” a teenager lining up to board a tour bus yelled out.
I downed some water in the shadow of the Commerce Department—the stomping grounds of Howard Lutnick, yet another Cabinet secretary who reportedly owns a pair of Trump-gifted shoes—before turning up Constitution Avenue toward the White House. The view was partially obscured by fencing, apparently an accommodation to one of Trump’s other recent aesthetic choices: tearing down the building’s decades-old East Wing to build a ballroom. Outside a suite of executive branch offices I spotted a dark-suited bald man carrying a file with the White House seal embossed on it. I pointed to his brown wing tips. “Those Florsheims?” I asked. “Yeah!” he responded with a grin as I indicated my own pair in a gesture of solidarity. “Game recognizes game,” the aide who’d been chattering in his ear said as they walked away.
A few steps later I met Nick Mato, another suited dude whose footwear initially looked promising but turned out to be from a competitor brand. “I don’t have a pair, so I’m not important enough,” Mato confessed, seeming to confirm that Florsheims have become something of a status symbol inside the administration. (A CNN story about the phenomenon was headlined “Male Shoe Anxiety Hits the Oval Office.”) Mato declined to tell me what he does for Trump. But his LinkedIn lists him as a communications director for DOGE, Elon Musk’s failed effort to cut wasteful government spending.
After getting as close to the White House as security checkpoints would allow, I looped back toward the Capitol building. The sun was starting to dip lower, and it was at this point that the Florsheims really began to fail me. As I trudged up Pennsylvania Avenue, one of the blisters that had been steadily growing beneath my left sole finally popped, a brief bloom of pain that left me limping in the shadow of a city transformed by the president. I stopped to regroup outside the Waldorf Astoria, which used to be the Trump International Hotel and a locus of moneyed interests’ efforts to curry favor with the first-term president. A block later I hobbled past the Justice Department, its facade festooned with a giant banner of Trump’s face.
When Trump-supporting Capitol rioters traversed a similar route five years ago, their target was Congress, where lawmakers were meeting to certify Joe Biden’s victory. Mine was Butterworth’s, a seductively lit French bistro that has become a popular hangout for off-the-clock Republican staffers under Trump 2.0. I sidled up to the bar with happy hour in full swing, feeling a little nauseated from the heat and mileage. The well-dressed Senate aide next door, who asked me not to use his name for fear of upsetting his boss, hadn’t heard about Trump’s fascination with Florsheim. And despite owning a pair of his own, brown Oxfords that he keeps under his desk at work, he didn’t seem taken with the president’s taste either. “If somebody gave me Florsheims as a gift, I would never be a snob about it,” the staffer told me. “I’m not a shoe snob or anything. But, you know, if you’re going to pay money for shoes ….”
According to podiatrists, the dangers of over- or undersized footwear are legion: bunions, corns, calluses, collapsed arches, ingrown nails, hammertoes, compressed nerves, swelling, numbness, joint pain, back pain, plantar fasciitis, and a heightened risk of tripping and stress fractures. Crawling into my hotel bed that evening, I cataloged the damage. The balls of both feet and the ends of both pointer toes had been mashed into misshapen blisters. The skin on both heels and a patch below my right pinkie had worn away, leaving behind angry pink abrasions. My feet were still aching when I boarded my flight home the next day.
To Florsheim’s credit, I doubt any other dress shoe would’ve served me much better. Beyond a couple of scuff marks and some debris jammed into the treads, our sojourn had left the shoes looking much as they had when I’d first taken them off the shelf. Yet as I wrangled them into my closet, something kept nagging at me like a pebble in an insole: Bernie Sanders’ eye-rolling dismissal outside the Senate elevator. On the one hand, I couldn’t really blame him. In these dark times, with a war on and inflation eating into Americans’ livelihoods, it’s objectively absurd to have played dress-up just to pester passersby about the president’s favorite footwear.
But with all due respect to the senator, I come away from this Florsheim-branded Washington travelogue thinking Sanders was wrong. An ill-fitting pair of shoes turns out to be a fitting talisman of the political world we’ve collectively inhabited since 2016. In this world, the bizarre proclivities of one man can disturb the peace and rattle markets. (For Florsheim, that aspect of Trumpism has been a mixed bag; the president’s fandom briefly juiced stock in the brand’s parent company, but its founder’s great-great-grandson has more recently groused about Trump’s costly tariffs.) In this world, a president who should be focused on passing legislation or negotiating with Iran is acting as his adjutants’ personal stylist—the most loyal of whom are so submissive that they’re willing to risk mangling their own feet just to follow in his footsteps. Our emperor may have no clothes. But he does have Florsheims.
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