Why Is Trump Giving Everyone the Wrong Shoes?

The president stood on the steps of the palace after the ball, watching the staffer depart. Technically, it was the White House, not a palace yet, and it was very difficult to host balls there, a deep, intractable problem for average Americans that he feared would overshadow his legacy if he failed to solve it. But what a magical evening it had been, at the ball! For once, things seemed to be going just right. And it was all thanks to that one perfect staffer. Everyone else the president had surrounded himself with was subpar, an as-seen-on-TV product whose shoddiness became apparent the second you saw it in natural lighting. Sometimes he suspected they were not really experts in their fields, and if they were ever asked to be in charge of waging wars, setting tariffs, or determining whether America is pro- or anti-measles, they would bungle it. But this staffer had been different. The One True Staffer! He had offered the president everything he wanted, just as he had always hoped: His tariffs would go up and prices would go down; he would drop his bombs and also get the Nobel Peace Prize. The president swore that this had really happened, and not just in a dream. (He never dreamed. Sleep was for the weak. In 2024, Marco Rubio had been sternly instructed never to nap, and since then, he had become so efficient that he now held almost every Cabinet position.) How to find the staffer again? The president stood on the steps of the palace, considering. He did not know the staffer’s name. If only he had paid any attention to any human being besides himself, even a single time! He must think. Shoes. Yes, shoes. He could see them now. Black leather Florsheim oxfords—the best shoes, and just $145. What size had they been? He would guess. He was very good at guessing that kind of thing, just as he was at guessing how much the American people would like a new tariff, or how long it would take to win a war, or how serious people were about the Epstein files. The president became greatly excited. He sent pair after pair of the shoes to his staffers, in the hope of finding a foot that fit them. Sometimes the foot was the wrong size. In the original German version of this tale, two unfortunate staffers had to lose toes and slice off a little bit of heel in order to be around the president, who had guessed their size incorrectly. When he noticed the blood trailing behind them, he cried aloud, “You are not my True Staffer!” and sent them home in disgrace. But this is not the German version—yet, anyway. (Female staffers were excluded from the search. They were already on their own quest to fit their faces to a peculiar model, in accordance with an ancient riddle: a face that looked not happy but not sad, not right for TV but not right for in person, not youthful but not aging, not plastic but not flesh. Whoever perfected that face would never be the One True Staffer, though; only a man could be the right fit.) The president kept hoping that Rubio was the One True Staffer. And indeed, Rubio claimed that the shoes fit him just fine. But the president had seen him. At a closer glance, the shoes hung off his feet and made him appear shrunken, as though he had gone through the wash on the wrong cycle. Soon everyone around the president was wearing the shoes. They stumbled from room to room, hobbled by tight toes or galumphing in oversize shoes. None of them would admit it, but they were all wearing the wrong size! They just gave him whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it, and things got worse and worse. Perhaps if he finished the ballroom, the perfect staffer would come back. In the meantime, the president tried other garments. Suits, ties, and, of course, a hat—a versatile garment, for just $55, to wear to both a tennis outing and a dignified transfer. You could tell from the gold lettering on a white background that it was tasteful. Gold on white, the two most tasteful colors. If you ever needed to remember them, you could simply ask yourself: What kind of supremacist is Nick Fuentes, and what kind of bars make the best bribes? But everyone fit the hats. No one seemed to fit the shoes. They just made everyone around him look silly and uncomfortable. By now it was a kind of uniform. It was always a sign of a healthy, functioning democracy when people had to demonstrate their allegiance to the leader by wearing certain special garments. And this was nothing if not a well-functioning democracy. The shoes had failed? Well, he would do beds next. Not for sleeping, just for measurement. He had the sense of one that would be a perfect size; the staffers could be cut to fit. So, too, with laws, with facts, with everything.