Laugh at Trump’s shoe gifts all you want — it’s a loyalty test

Donald Trump is having great fun gifting $145 Florsheim leather cap toe Oxford dress shoes to Cabinet members, agency heads, advisers and whatever VIPs have earned his favor.

Trump guesses their shoe size and then has an assistant place an order. When the shoes arrive a week later, he signs the shoe box or adds a personal note. It does not matter if they are too big, too small or plainly uncomfortable. The recipient is expected to wear the shoes and perform gratitude. 

Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and other senior officials are now wearing the shoes. So is GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. MAGA influencer Tucker Carlson is sporting a pair of brown wingtips courtesy of the president.

In a different timeline, this would be just harmless fun — a quirk of the president’s personality, nothing more. But we do not live in that world. Trump is an authoritarian and an aspiring dictator. His gift of shoes is no such thing. It functions as a loyalty oath, one ritual in a much larger pattern of humiliation and dominance.

One White House official put it plainly, the Wall Street Journal reported: “It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear [the shoes].”

Trump loves to publicly insult his rivals and make them grovel for his approval, so he must know that the shoes do not always fit. A recent photo of Rubio shows that his Oxfords are much too large for his feet. As part of this ritual, Trump also reportedly makes fun of men who have small feet and what this supposedly implies about their sexual potency.

But the objects of his hazing are publicly unfazed. After all, they are used to playing the role of clownish sycophants, praising Trump in Cabinet meetings as the greatest president in American history — unrivaled, they say, in intelligence and leadership. And all of Washington is reminded of this, with Trump’s face being emblazoned on huge banners on the exterior of the Departments of Justice, Labor and other federal buildings. The Kennedy Center has been unofficially renamed for him. Even America’s 250th birthday is shaping up to be a de facto celebration of Trump’s rule. Congressional Republicans are pushing to put his face on Mount Rushmore and currency, and to establish a federal holiday in his honor.

Trump believes that he is on a mission from God, that the MAGA movement is divine, that he defines his own morality and ethics, and answers to no external authority — not the Constitution or the rule of law — only to himself.

This brings us back to the shoes. If Trump can dictate how the world’s most powerful men dress and behave, he can go even further — controlling their minds and emotions. This is what total authoritarian control over a society looks like in practice.

Stephen Hassan is one of the world’s leading experts on cult psychology and the author of “The Cult of Trump.” I reached out to him for his interpretation of the president’s shoe ritual. “True believers — the people who give everything to the cult — are psychologically and emotionally programmed and trained, where your real identity is suppressed by the cult identity that’s in the image of the cult leader,” he said. “The cult followers are to think like, feel like, and walk like the cult leader.”

Hassan is himself a former cult member, and he argues that MAGA is not merely a personality cult. It’s also “an undue influence operation” and “a mirror of a religious, political cult.”

Ritualistic humiliation is a standard tactic in the authoritarian’s playbook. Stalin supposedly expected endless applause — stop clapping too soon and you risked prison or death. He also forced senior Communist Party officials to dance on command. His successor Nikita Khrushchev recalled being made to perform the gopak. “I had to squat and kick my heels out, which, frankly, was not easy for me,” he said. “But when Stalin says ‘play,’ a wise man plays.”

China’s Mao Zedong forced party officials to give self-corrective monologues in which they asked forgiveness for their own stupidity and failing to follow his wise leadership.

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Historian and authoritarian expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat described ritual humiliation as one of the autocrat’s favorite weapons. “Autocrats are fragile and insecure creatures who are always looking over their shoulder to see who is after them,” she wrote. “To build themselves up and deter others from challenging their power, they take others down in public, letting them know exactly where they stand and how much they scorn them.” 

The humiliation is integral to the authoritarian’s personalist-style of rule, Ben-Ghiat argued. “Ritual humiliation also translates into governmental practices which create an environment in which no one feels safe, no matter how much of the leader’s dirty work they do and how many compliments they bestow on him. And yet these leaders never lack a steady supply of opportunists and profiteers who are all too willing to play his game to the detriment of their dignity. The GOP is the latest example.”

Ultimately, Trump’s shoe ritual comes from the same part of his mind and personality which cannot accept that he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 and that Barack Obama is more beloved than he will ever be. This same compulsion is now driving Trump’s quest for an illegal third term, his moves to rig the November midterms, and his desire to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law to remain in power indefinitely.

Trump appears to believe that he is the State. In his mind, everyone should be a little Trumper, part of his MAGA collective, and an extension of his emotions, will, and ego.

Given his age, declining public approval and other signs of apparent political and physical weakness, can the MAGA movement exist without him? Or are MAGA and Trumpism a new type of personal identity, a way of thinking and being in the world that is larger than any one man or leader?

History offers two paths. In one, Trump’s followers will one day quietly pack away their MAGA hats and other such regalia — and then deny that they ever believed. In the other, Trump becomes a myth, canonized by time and the right-wing propaganda machine. In this timeline, he is to them an American God and Greatest Man of History.

Trump’s Florsheims will eventually fall apart and be thrown in the trash. But I deeply fear that what they symbolize about his authoritarian — and yes, potentially totalitarian — project will last much longer.

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