Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri walked a mental mile in former President Donald Trump’s golden sneakers and came away with stinky feet and the urge to commit felonies, she wrote Thursday.
“Let’s do a felony,” Petri’s protagonist declares as the fictional character slips on the sneakers. Then he asks, “When are the darn shoes going to kick in?”
Pretty quickly, it turns out.
Soon the golden Trump sneaker wearer is installing his family in the Republican National Committee, waiting for people to send him money they do not owe and crying at a picture of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida social club paradise.
“Nothing has ever seemed so beautiful, or worth so much money,” Petri narrates. “You have forgotten that Tiffany Trump exists.”
There are losses, of course.
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Her protagonist finds himself indebted to former New York City Rudy Giuliani as the crowd around him dissipates.
“Oddly, the number of people in the room seems to have been cut in half,” writes Petri. “There are your friends, and there are also women, who are something different and less than people.”
The journey into Trump’s imagined mind, which descends into a nightmare of indictments and poverty, lasts just as long as Petri expects the sneakers will.
“These are not well-constructed, it turns out,” Petri writes. “Your feet emerge. They are sweaty.”
All that remains, according to Petri, is a lingering admiration for the beauty of Mar-a-Lago bathrooms.
She writes, “You have walked a mile too far.”
