Applying for a role you have a vanishingly small chance of getting is rather terrifying, but at least it shows that there’s interest in a relatively old-fashioned type of job rather than, say, reviewing sandwiches on social media (and in this divided world, I’d hope we can all agree on immediate jail sentences for people who review sandwiches on social media).
Another old-school job that’s clearly doing well — thanks to noted fashion expert U.S. President Donald Trump — is shoemaking. Apparently the American leader has been forcing his aides to wear $145 Florsheim dress shoes. “All the boys have them,” a female White House official told the Wall Street Journal, which wrote the shoe story. “It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them,” another joked in the same piece.
Incidentally, Michael Jackson also wore Florsheim shoes. Trump and Jackson! That either means the company has great PR or terrible PR, depending on your point of view.
Anyway, the great shoe giveaway led to photos of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wearing a pair that are clearly far too big for him. It’s like an Oval Office version of Cinderella, where the person whose foot fits the shoe gets to go to the (golden) ball with Prince Uncharming.
At the time of writing, Rubio hadn’t thrown a shoe — or shoes — at Trump in the manner of Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi, who in 2008 hurled his footwear at then-U.S. president George W. Bush at a press conference in Baghdad. Though Vice President JD Vance did once reveal that Trump said: “You know, you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size.” Indeed you can, mainly his height.
Perhaps Trump will now look more favorably on Margrethe Vestager, the former European commissioner he described as that “tax lady” who “really hates the U.S.,” after she fined Apple $14 billion over illegal tax breaks. As POLITICO reported last year, Vestager now has her own line of shoes — the Margrethe Boot from shoe company Roccamore — and she’s even been modeling them on billboards.