"we are all wearing Florsheims now" "pretending there is a functioning alternative reality" [View all]

Trump's Wild War Game
Tina Brown

If you want to understand where we are at this moment in Trump’s second administration, all you have to do is look at that picture of Marco Rubio wearing a pair of oversized Florsheim shoes. This footwear, the WSJ revealed, is Trump’s go-to gift for members of his inner circle, to whom he wishes to show approbation. He determines the shoe size by rough instinct and, 24 hours later, a pair of $145 leather oxfords, the proud badge of political servility, arrives.




We are in Uganda’s Idi Amin territory now. I dream of the cabinet meeting when Trump is finally pelted with Florsheims, like that glorious moment in 2008 when the Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi hurled his shoes at President Bush during a joint press conference with Iraqi puppet PM al-Maliki in Baghdad. “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, dog!” shouted Muntadhar, before he was wrestled to the ground and thrown into jail. (“I don’t know what his beef is,” commented Bush, who lacked imagination at the best of times.)


The unsettling thing is, we are all wearing Florsheims now. Not because we lack raucous expressions of dissent at the manner in which America lurched into a war of choice with Iran, but because we all keep pretending there is a functioning alternative reality in which norms, policy, think tanks, and geopolitical game plans still play their traditional roles. Pundits speak sonorously about “regime modification” (shorthand for a next-gen, turban-charged Islamic republic) and the “extension of presidential power,” as if this were the long-ago world of institutional gravitas and coequal branches of government, instead of an inescapable escape room, in which we are trapped with a berserk brontosaurus peddling vehement ignorance


https://tinabrown.substack.com/p/trumps-wild-war-game