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The secretary of state of the United States of America is openly slopping around in a pair of too-big shoes that he has to wear because the president gave them to him. Why? Possibly as a piece of exquisite and complex satire about the size of his penis; possibly because Marco Rubio exaggerated his shoe size because he rightly assumed it would be linked to presidential speculation about the size of his penis.
According to the vice-president, JD Vance, Donald Trump gives all his best boys a particular brand of shoe, either after guessing their size or making them disclose it. “The president, he kind of leans back in his chair,” explained Vance a couple of months ago, “and he says: ‘You know, you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size.’” Strong words, particularly from a president with such famously tiny hands. Incidentally, Vance casually dropped it into the anecdote that he wore a 13.
Anyway: Vance, Rubio, defence secretary Pete Hegseth – they all have a pair. Of shoes. I can’t comment on the other, but let’s just say they’re about as likely to have the balls to stand up to Trump as they are to bin off the greasy pole of politics and risk it all in pursuit of excellence in competitive ice dancing. Certainly they would like you to deny the evidence of your own eyes and agree that there is absolutely nothing obviously emasculating about your boss buying your shoes and you having to wear them even though they don’t fit and make you look stupid. As one White House official told the Wall Street Journal: “It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them.” So everybody’s a goody two-shoes.
All three guys are, of course, on barely covert manoeuvres for a future presidential run. And maybe there’s a sense among these hopeful men that if the black leather slipper fits, they will be the one to gain the Maga movement’s hand in marriage once the almost-80-year-old Trump has turned back into a pumpkin. Only instead of an ugly sister trying to jam her trotter into something far too small, we have a secretary of state trying to expand to fit a pair of far-too-big reasonably priced black Oxfords. Impossible not to think back to previous occupants of Rubio’s role – John Quincy Adams, George Marshall, George Shultz, James Baker – and not fall back on the obvious idiom. Big shoes to fill. Rubio rightly resembles a small child playing dress-up with something he found in Daddy’s wardrobe.
And regime-wise, it’s aesthetically painful. So many of Trump’s ideological forebears at least understood the importance of good gentleman’s outfitting. But it does all point to that peculiarly distinctive mix of vanity and indignity required in a Trump henchman. You must take an excruciatingly obnoxious sort of pride in yourself, at the same time as submitting utterly to his regular humiliations.
Take Hegseth. Even that surname feels as though it might be a doubled-down-on slip of the tongue, like he’s actually called Hesgeth but once said it wrong, refused to admit it and ever since then has just been butching it out. The defence secretary has certainly cultivated a similarly unapologetic yet absurd look: suits straining to cover his tattoos and hair like one of the latex president masks the surfers in Point Break wear to rob banks. And, naturally, The Shoes. Alas, though, Pete’s machismo is in fact incredibly vulnerable. This week, Hegseth became so incensed by “unflattering” photos of him taken in the Pentagon briefing room that he has banned press photographers from taking pictures in that space. The only images available will now come from official Pentagon photographers, all of whom will presumably be ordered never to capture shots of his feet. Meanwhile it is thanks to shoe-leather journalism, particularly by the New York Times, that we know the US has been found responsible for the Tomahawk missile strike on an elementary school in Iran on the first day of fighting. So what of shoe-leather defence secretarying? In the Trump era, that demands lacking both the decency and honour to admit this devastatingly atrocious mistake.
Somehow, though, in this tale of three henchmen, the one on the least sure footing is Vance. All of us have had to grow accustomed to reading the Trump administration simply by vibes. And following his clearly lukewarm support for the war on Iran – as you might expect for someone who made no more “stupid wars” his pitch – how would you define the current vibe around Vance? There is a distinct feeling, isn’t there, that he is nothing but a spare part in this war, even frozen out of his role as chief shitposter now the White House social accounts are taking care of embarrassing war memes. Some even sense that Vance might well be headed sooner rather than later into what Anthony Scaramucci calls the woodchipper – the inevitable destination of all Trump henchmen, in the end.
In fact, the war and his non-role in it have exposed both Vance’s limits as an operator, and the places his previous positions have boxed him into when all he really has is form for bending himself to whoever he perceives the most valuable elite to be at any given time. Vance has always managed up and not down. He’s not the little guy’s guy – he’s the big guy’s guy. He is, ultimately, a creature of the boss that buys his footwear. So maybe he does wear size 13s – but all things considered, they’re starting to look like dead men’s shoes.
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
