So many Suits

The suit is a dream. Not the kind that stretches into the blue hush of dawn, but the kind that lingers on a polished cufflink, the quiet glint of silver in the low light of a room where decisions are made. It is an emblem, a whispered suggestion of control. No man with the right shoulders in the right suit ever needs to say he is powerful. The cut of the cloth does that for him.

Donald Trump understood this. He understood the way a man wears himself into history, the way a stiff collar and a long tie can be as much a declaration of war as a formal address. He spent his life fashioning an empire of gilded mirrors, reflecting back a world in which money was meaning and appearance was action. His suit was never just fabric. It was a fable, a conjurer’s trick, a promise that could never be fulfilled.

And when he sold them—his signature line of business wear, the Donald J. Trump Signature Collection—he did so with the unshakable confidence of a man who had mistaken his own illusion for the truth. The suits were designed to whisper the same sweet lie that his buildings did: Wear this, and you, too, will be powerful.

But even Gatsby’s shirts were real. Trump’s suits were made in China.

It hardly mattered. The workers he spoke to, the men who heard him bellow about bringing jobs back to America, didn’t pause to wonder where the fabric was spun. They believed, because the believing was easier than the alternative. They were sold the same well-pressed dream that had been tailored for generations—the dream that the right man in the right suit would take care of them.

Then came the tariffs. Trump announced them with the self-satisfaction of a magician revealing the prestige of his act, a grandiose plan to punish the very system he had spent a lifetime exploiting. He imposed taxes on Chinese imports, a blow against globalization that would send shivers down the spine of every industry built on cheap labor.

He knew. He knew his own suits would be impacted. He knew that T-shirts, textiles, and the goods of everyday men would suddenly be more expensive. He knew, and he did not care.

For Trump, the cost of the illusion was never a burden. He could afford it, after all. The price of a suit was only ever a problem for the men who worked the factories, the men who clocked in and out with no golden parachute, no bailout. For them, the tariffs were not a chess move in a global trade war—they were the difference between paying rent and not. But to Trump, they were a headline, a triumph, another flourish of the hands before the next trick.

But the illusion of the suit has always been fragile, and history has never been kind to men who believe too much in their own reflections. The truth comes undone in quiet, in moments when the lights are dim and the illusion falters, when the lie no longer holds.

In another time, in another war, the suit was also a battleground. The Zoot Suit Riots, the Swing Kids in Berlin, the Zazous in Paris—all of them knew what a suit could mean, what it could be. In the right hands, a suit was not just a mark of power but a mark of defiance. To wear it was to declare oneself visible in a world that wanted some men invisible.

And then there was Zelenskyy.

He came not in a suit, but in fatigues, standing in a room where every man had tailored himself to the image of authority. He did not speak with the smooth cadence of statesmen trained in rhetoric, nor did he carry himself with the easy indifference of men who had never known the weight of war.

Trump and Vance saw him and scoffed. Not because they misunderstood, but because they understood too well. The illusion of the suit had always worked in their favor, and Zelenskyy had walked in and shattered it.

But men like Trump and Vance do not wear suits by accident. They do not choose their words without purpose. They are not clumsy in their intentions. They had all the power in the world to understand the moment, and they chose—deliberately—to take offense at his clothing, to sneer at the war-torn man who refused to bow to their decorum.

They framed his fatigues as a sign of disrespect. But the truth was simpler, colder, harder: he made them uncomfortable.

He did not play along.

And what is a man to do when the rules of the game change? When the soft hum of a silk tie is no longer enough to command obedience?

They had to make him small. If they could not make him weak, they would make him impolite. If they could not make him seem afraid, they would make him seem rude.

But Zelenskyy did not need to dress for the part. He did not need a double-breasted lie, did not need the gleaming illusion of power stitched into lapels. His authority was something older, something real, something men like Trump and Vance had never known and never would.

History has seen men like them before. And it has seen men like Zelenskyy, too.

Because power is not in the fabric. It is not in the pinstripes, the gold cufflinks, the monogrammed shirts. Power is in the standing, in the refusal to bow, in the moments when the men in suits turn their heads and whisper because they have seen something they cannot explain, something they cannot replicate.

And if he survives, then so does democracy for all its flaws, by association humanity persists.