Marco Rubio confronted an all-too-familiar sight on Thursday night: A pair of shiny black boots.
While Rubio, appearing on NBC’s “The Tonight Show,” made his way to the guest couch, host Jimmy Fallon greeted him with his feet propped up on his desk, prominently displaying the most buzzed about shoes in presidential politics.
“Thank you very much for being here,” Fallon said nonchalantly as the audience laughed. “Oh, I’m sorry. Do you like my boots?”
Rubio caused a stir weeks ago when he wore a fashionable pair of black boots on a trip to New York, prompting some ribbing from his presidential rivals. But on Thursday night he was in on the joke, replying, “Those are nice. Where’d you get those, man?”
During his interview, the Florida senator laughed about the infamous boots, reminiscing about a time in college when he ruined a similar pair of boots attending a “foam party.”
“I brought some of those and when I left the foam party, they were white,” Rubio said. “Because the foam washed the dye out of it. It was really bad, so these are like a step up.”
And Rubio, in New York for the show, explained that the city — which emerged as a point of controversy when “New York Values” became an attack line in the GOP primary — was especially meaningful to him because it’s where he proposed to his wife, on the top of the Empire State Building in an homage to “Sleepless in Seattle.”
Admitting he was worried his wife would drop the ring off the top of the building, Rubio joked, “They should have done it out by somewhere flatter.”
Rubio, who do not appear to be wearing his trademark footwear Thursday, also talked politics during his appearance, joking in response to a question about Donald Trump, “Who’s that?” and saying that he had no interest in being a vice presidential pick. But an avowed football fan and college athlete, Rubio had another position of power in mind.
“That’s not what I’m thinking about. I either — I’d want to be commissioner of the NFL, which is more powerful than president sometimes,” he joked. “You have a lot of power in that job — you can suspend people.”
Fallon replied, “You can send me some jerseys or something like that.”
Rubio added, “Or some boots.”