Anyone looking at Ron DeSantis’s feet during his lackluster presidential run has noticed that something is off. Why do the Florida governor’s boots look so weird? There’s simply too much boot for one man.
For months, the online chattering classes have been speculating that DeSantis is wearing inserts in his shoes to boost his height. This week, the candidate’s footwear issue finally came to a head after podcast host Patrick Bet-David raised it directly with him. DeSantis denied that he was doing anything suspicious, claiming he wears off-the-rack Lucchese boots.
“How tall are you, governor?” asked Bet-David.
“Five-eleven,” DeSantis answered, rather quickly.
On Tuesday, Politico followed up on this all-important issue, asking three shoe experts about the likelihood of DeSantis wearing lifts. The results looked worse for DeSantis than his polling in Iowa. “I’ve dealt with these politicians many times,” Houston boot-maker Zephan Parker told Politico. “I’ve helped them with their lifts. [DeSantis] is wearing lifts; there’s no doubt.” According to Parker’s analysis of DeSantis’s boots, the effect is the same as wearing “five-inch stilettos.” One giveaway, he said, is the extremely wide top of DeSantis’s boots, which would allow the candidate to slip lifts in.
Austin boot-maker Graham Ebner also pointed out the obvious wiggle room DeSantis has in his boot’s “toe spring,” the area where a wearer’s toes curl up. Ebner said it wouldn’t make sense for the boots to have that much room “unless the heels were being lifted dramatically.”
The consensus extends beyond Texas. London shoemaker Nicholas Templeman noted that the widest part of a shoe is usually toward the front, where the pad of one’s foot rests on the ground, but that DeSantis’s foot appears widest in the middle of his boot. “If you put lifts inside a pair of ready-made boots, you’re going to put the front of your foot in the middle of the boot, which is not shaped for the widest part of your foot,” Templeman said. “This will push out the leather and cause it to hang over the boot.”
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But the three boot experts told Politico that they believed DeSantis’s lifts gave him about 1.5 inches of extra height — enough to put him above the unofficial minimum for modern presidents. The last president to be shorter than six feet was Jimmy Carter.
DeSantis’s press secretary firmly denied any funny boot business to Politico and attacked the publication in the process.
