Donald Trump has been likened to many people and figures, including Adolf Hitler, Satan, Queen Esther, Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, and most recently, Alexei Navalny (the latter five are comparisons that either he or those around him have made). I once compared Trump to a substance in response to a question that the author Walter Kirn had posed on X (then Twitter). “What I wanted,” Kirn subsequently wrote in his Harper’s column, “was an image of Trump’s first year that would stimulate the imagination without paralyzing the will. The writer Deanne Stillman put it best, I think, when she wrote on Twitter that Trump is luminol, the chemical that police spray on crime scenes to reveal traces of blood.” In other words, Kirn added, Trump “shows us where the blood is—the old blood, the blood that has dried and that no one wants to see.”
By now, we are way beyond my comparison, way past Trump as revelator of America’s basest impulses and desires. When it was recently announced that Trump was selling shoes, I immediately thought of Willy Loman, the tragic figure at the center of Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman. It’s not that Trump has a heart or is remotely tragic like Willy. Trump wasn’t some everyman but a penthouse president. But they are both salesman and, in Trump’s case, a creature of Dale Carnegie, the man who famously penned How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Norman Vincent Peale, the pastor whose book The Power of Positive Thinking became a mega-seller in the 1950s and drew Trump’s father Fred to take his family (including Donald) to Peale’s Manhattan church so they could absorb his bromides.
Willy Loman was also influenced by a revered salesman, Dave Singleman, a figure of Miller’s imagination. “And old Dave,” Willy says in Death of a Salesman, “he’d go up to his room, y’understand, put on his green velvet slippers—I’ll never forget—and pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without ever leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four he made his living. And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. ’Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?” At Singleman’s funeral, dozens of salesmen and buyers showed up to mourn his passing. That was the guy Willy emulated, and how mightily he tried to get there.
However, as is often the case in our country, the dice are loaded, and the dealer works for the house; unlike Trump, whose father Fred, a real estate magnate, handed him an empire, Loman was self-made. There was no one to bail him out, no banks, and no foreign nations seeking a favor. (Through a combination of a merger and an initial public offering of Donald Trump’s social media company, the former president may have just come into billions.) Only a friend and rival named Charley provides a gift masquerading as a loan when things are collapsing around Willy.
Trump is a desperate salesman on the hook for $464 million due to a guilty verdict in his New York civil fraud trial. To date, no one—not a single foreign entity or even a payday loan branch in a Queens mall—will provide Trump with a bond necessary for an appeal. The Art of the Deal was fake news. Unfortunately, this development comes too late for a particular mom (as I wrote here) who read Trump’s book to her unborn son like a fairy tale, hoping he’d grow up and emulate Trump. He did make some investments, then went on to become a school shooter.
So, the guy who hawked vodka, steak, condos, land, cologne (actually named “Empire” and “Success”), shirts, ties, cufflinks, watches, “lock her up” bumper stickers, and hats, has turned to shoes. In another era, it might have been vacuum cleaners or encyclopedias, the standard offering of traveling salesmen like Loman. Miller never says what Willy is selling. In the end, it doesn’t matter. As Donald Trump Jr said in 2016 regarding Hillary Clinton, “I mean, what’s she selling? She’s really not selling any merchandise. What products does she have that are out there?”
The former president’s turn as a shoe salesman was a new level of shabbiness even for Trump, who, in ads on social media, gleefully brandished the flag-emblazoned golden shoes that matched his famed gilded toilet. He has even gone so far as to say that Black people will go for the high-tops because they like sneakers, comparing himself yet again to an icon; in this case, it was a coded nod to Michael Jordan, whose eponymous footwear—Air Jordan—invoked his singular basketball accomplishments. But the only thing that links Trump and Jordan is the word “air,” and I’m not talking about “air rights,” which Trump has also sold in connection with skyscrapers. Trump is full of air, and weirdly, he now inadvertently admits it via a self-branded shoe—in an act that is perhaps the most convoluted of his myriad public projections.
Interestingly, like Loman, it was an affair that brought Trump to his current state. His payoff of Stormy Daniels, the adult film actor whose silence he bought before the 2016 election, heads to trial next month, and it may be the only one of Trump’s criminal trials that sees completion by Election Day. Good ol’ Willy Loman, devoted husband and family man was able to keep his affair secret for 15 years via a serious juggling act from the moment his son Biff walked in on his liaison. But from that point on, Loman’s family fable began to unravel. The belief that Willy is a successful salesman turns out to be an illusion, and ultimately, Willy disintegrates, unable to face himself or the world. Driven to suicide, no one but his family comes to his funeral.
There is no way selling shoes will net the fortune Trump needs to pay off his legal judgments. If he somehow comes up with the millions of dollars he owes as per other verdicts, he acts like a man in financial jeopardy, as we see in his outreach to devotees on social media. “I’m very humbly asking if you could chip in $5, $10, or even $25,” he recently said, leaning into our collective car window like a squeegee guy at a New York intersection. And his self-branded kicks, dubbed “Never Surrender,” are now marked down from $399 to $99, a quarter of the original asking price. Worse still for him, to borrow Willy Loman’s words, certain territories are now closed off. Trump can’t run his businesses in New York for three years, and the prices for condo sales at Trump Tower are dropping.
“After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive,” Loman says as he plans his final act, which is killing himself in a car accident so that his family can collect his life insurance. Whether or not the Loman family receives it is not said, but the suicide was the ultimate sacrifice of self—something that is not in Trump’s nature. In all the years he has been on the national scene, I’ve yet to hear one person come forward to say, “What a great friend! I love that guy!” We don’t need pollsters to call this one: Trump is a loser, no matter what he says or if he wins in November. His legacy is zero, darkness; he’s a font of fetid ethers that has enveloped America for far too long.
Someday, all that remains will be those Trump shoes—soon to pop up on Etsy or eBay as curios—along with all of the other stuff that Trump has put his name on. His signature, now a joke, can secure nothing. To paraphrase a line from Blake, the smooth-talking character played by Alec Baldwin in the film version of another play about salesmen, Glengarry Glen Ross, “Always be lying.” When America comes to its senses, hopefully, an asterisk appears next to Trump’s name on the presidential roster, signifying a salesman who may have closed the ultimate deal, unmasked for the ages as a fraud.
