Back in 2012, then-citizen Donald Trump tweeted that President Barack Obama’s birth certificate was a fraud, based off information from an “extremely credible source.” Four years later, Trump reversed his position on anonymous sources, saying that people should not believe them, tweeting, “If they don’t name the sources, the sources don’t exist.” Thanks to one clever inventor, that flip-flop by now-President Trump has been commemorated in an actual flip flop.
The plastic flip flops, emblazoned with the president’s flip flops, are the creation of Sam Morrison, who works on the creative side of the advertising industry, who decided to turn the president’s tweets into wearable political statements after observing Trump’s changes of heart. “The President has a track record of making misleading statements,” Morrison told TIME. “The objective was to use his own words to turn him into his own worst critic.” He did because as Morrison sees it, “the only person Donald Trump listens to is Donald Trump.”
To create the shoes, Morrison’s first stop was Twitter. “I was looking for tweets that made for an obvious contradiction,” he said. Luckily for Morrison, who says it wasn’t a time consuming task. “They’re relatively easy to find. Any time Trump posts an outlandish opinion, I simply search his Twitter history and often will find a contradiction from previous years,” he explained.
He opted to make three different flip flop designs, all based on pairs of Trump tweets, including the one about sources, a series of contradictions about Syria, and differing opinions on the validity of the electoral college (in 2012, he called it “a disaster”, after he won the presidency, he called the electoral college “actually genius”). “While there have been many more flip flopping tweets since President Flip Flops came out, at the time, these were three solid choices,” Morrison said.
Morrison had to purchase 1,000 pairs of flip-flops in order to convince a company to make them. He went for it anyway, coming up with three different flip-flop designs in five different sizes. He sold them on his website for $27.99 a set with a promised 10% of sales going to the ACLU. It was a good investment as, Morrison sold out in “about three weeks”. Unfortunately for people who want to wear his presidential flip flops, Morrison has no plans to make more.
While Morrison has no intention of getting back into the flip-flop business, he is still dabbling in politics. His next project is an interactive book with a political theme. He also still updates the @prezflipflops Twitter account, posting new contradictory tweets.
