Trump’s Flip-flopity Tweets Inspire Actual Flip Flops. Hilarity Ensues.
Ever since he won the presidential election in November 2016, Donald Trump makes it to international news every time he publishes his hot take on global issues on Twitter, one of the largest social media platforms. You only need a quick scroll through Trump’s tweets to see the man is aggressively opinionated and contradictory.
Enter Sam Morrison, a 27-year-old artist/photographer from LA who turns Trump’s hypocritical tweets into print designs on flip flops. They’ve been available for purchase since 2017 on presidentflipflops.com, but completely sold out only a month after their launch. Wanting to highlight Trump’s self-contradicting criticism, Morrison’s first step was to go through 40,000 tweets on Trump’s account and pick out the best (read: worst) of the bunch. He focuses on topics of Syria, U.S. election process, and the press. Morrison also personally handles everything in this operation, from choosing the footwear materials, printing the texts, to designing the package and delivery.
The comical collection of flip flops is a limited run with only 1,000 pairs made. There are three designs available, corresponding to each selected topic of Trump’s tweets. The sole comes in Republican red with a white band and the printed-on tweets. In the first design, “Syria Edition”, one tweet is from Trump in 2013 to then-president Barack Obama. In all caps, it reads “AGAIN TO OUR VERY FOOLISH LEADER. DO NOT ATTACK SYRIA - IF YOU DO MANY VERY BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN & FROM THAT FIGHT THE U.S. GETS NOTHING!” But after the U.S. launched missiles over Syria in 2017, Trump endorsed the attack by tweeting “Congratulations to our great military men and women for representing the United States, and the world, so well in the Syria attack.”
The second design, “Electoral College Edition”, involves the U.S. election process. After Obama won the presidential election in 2012, Trump declared “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” And yet four years later, when Trump himself won by electoral votes, he tweeted “The Electoral College is actually genius in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play. Campaigning is much different!”
The last design, “Sources Edition”, focuses on the issue of news sources. Trump tweeted in 2012 that “An ‘extremely credible source’ called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud.” But then, in a classic Trump move, he stated in 2016 “Remember, don’t believe ‘sources said’ by the VERY dishonest media. If they don’t name the sources, the sources don’t exist.”
Morrison sells a pair of these for 27.99 USD (about 898 THB). Ten percent of the sales is donated to American Civil Liberties Union - ACLU, an organization which pushes back against many of Trump’s policies such as the Muslim ban and transgender military service ban. As Trump continues on with his political flops, there’s a good chance of Morrison starting another project to express his views against Mr. President. Don’t forget to keep an eye out for when he does launch a new collection to get your hands on the hottest items!