When I was a kid, and admittedly long before I stopped wearing leather, my favorite pair of sneakers was a low top suede basketball shoe from Puma called the Clyde, named after basketball star Clyde Frazier. There’s a mythology that it was suede instead of traditional leather to make it easier to produce a broad range of colors to match Frazier’s fashion sensibilities, one of his many outstanding characteristics. I didn’t know any of this at the time, but I did think they were about the coolest things a kid could wear, even cooler than the three striped Adidas floating around our house.
So I suppose I understand at least a little bit how Trump fans feel right now. That’s because last week the also eccentric former President/criminal defendant has his own pair of signature named sneakers that also embody the image he aspires to portray. Trump announced the product launch at an event called Sneaker Con in Philadelphia, a gathering of sneaker collectors commonly knowing as Sneakerheads. If you aren’t familiar, this subculture is larger than the Grand Canyon and has economic stability that would make most cryptocurrencies blush. Trump, who said he’s been thinking about doing this for a long time, announced his new basketball shaped high tops at this event to a chorus of cheers and boos, a line you can attach to pretty much any time he makes a public appearance.
The shoes, not surprisingly, are painted a metallic gold color with an American flag emblem on ankle and a “T” stamped on the side. It looks like something Borat would wear to a scrimmage at a Washington DC pickup game. Only for Trump fans, there’s no irony. There’s also none available, as the first release of 1000 pair sold out at the bargain price of $399. To be clear, the shoes haven’t been made or distributed yet, so these are pre-orders with an estimated shipping date in July. There is little that would make me more nervous than giving $400 to the Trump organization with a promise I’ll get something in return five months from now.
One group seemingly not buying Trump shoes are true sneaker collectors, who seem collectively to be offput by the mere concept. I’m going to also assume that not a single professional, semi-professional, college, or otherwise competent competitive basketball player will be sporting Air Trumps on the court, not that they’ve been marketed as such. To be fair, sneakers long, long ago crossed the divide from sport to fashion, even those seemingly designed for athletics. I know very few Jordan collectors will ever shoot hoops in a pair. But at least someone might. And let’s be clear, I would be willing to wager a pair of these shoes over the fact that they are produced in the cheapest knockoff factory known to mankind, the kind of place New York City purse vendors would laugh at. And since there’s literally nothing available about how or where these shoes are made, my guess is a good anyone’s.
It would be easy now to talk about the influence of sports, and particularly basketball, on the larger landscape of global culture and finance. That might include conversations of race, post-modernism, commodification, and the evolving celebrity construct that’s moved into hyperdrive in the social media age. All of that applies as Donald Trump tries to parlay the longtime success of endorsed athletic wear as his next grift on the American public. And by the way, I’m not letting shoe companies and athletes off the hook for the longtime practice of inflating consumer prices to adolescents through the mediated construction of artificial needs. But that’s for another day.
So instead, I’ll leave it at this. After several years, Frazier’s deal with Puma ended and they instead marketed a similar shoe under the name Suedes, which held iconic status in countless communities off the court. Those stood the test of time until Clyde signed a lifetime deal in 2018, bringing back his shoe and an opportunity for sneaker aficionados to wear his namesake once again. I suppose that’s because at the core, the Puma Clyde was the rare confluence of style and substance, a player with significant impact paired with a shoe of equal stature. In the new Trumps, we have neither, but rather a con game trying to convince us it’s of the same ilk, its gold appearance more reminiscent of the biblical cow than any color Puma produced for Frazier. Which is why I expect Trump’s sneakers to wear just about as well as his presidency.
Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler
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