I can’t be the only person to gaze in horror at Donald Trump’s suits. For a man who is apparently a multi-millionaire he dresses like a sack of potatoes tied in the middle (as my old gran would say). His suits are expensive, made to measure and yet still he looks scruffy and badly dressed.

The shoulders are too narrow, the suit gapes when he sits down, his tie is too long and the knot is too small.

But the worst abomination of all are his trousers, which flop and flap around his podgy thighs and are permanently creased and crumpled. For the President of the country which gave us Sta-Prest this is unacceptably sloppy.

To explain Trump’s trouser problem we need some basic trouser mathematics. Slackamatics.

I wear a 36″ waist. It should be a bit less, but I work in food and drink. Laid flat my trousers are 18″ wide. For a straight leg finish I need 18″ bottoms. Laid flat each leg is 9″, and 2 x 9 = 18″. The bottoms match the top. If I want a skinny fit I would wear a 16″ bottom. If you want to picture that Levi 501s have a 16.5″ bottom. I would avoid anything much smaller than that because they would look odd, the top would be much bigger than the bottoms, and I would look like I had chicken wings for legs. This is why super skinny jeans with a 14″ bottom or less only look good on people with a small waist. Or you end up like this:

My feet are 11″ long, so a pair of straight trousers will leave 2″ of shoe on display, slightly more because I wear mine with a break, a slight crease at the bottom of the trouser where they rest on the shoe. My jeans leave 3-4″ of shoe sticking out the bottom.

Trump is roughly my height, and I am guessing he has similar size feet. This means that a bottom on his trousers greater than 22″ will hide his shoes completely, which looks weird on anyone.

The bottoms on Trumps trousers are roughly 17-18″, which makes his feet look big and manly. Like mine.

This is where Trumps problem arises. A straight legged trouser with a 17-18″ bottom means a 34-36″ waist. Trump however is pretty clearly an awful lot fatter than that. My guess is at least a 42″ waist if not more. This creates a problem for the tailor, because a straight leg trouser with a 42″ waist has a 21″ bottom, which would swallow his shoes.

President Kim from North Korea has exactly this problem, a massive waist, and straight leg trousers make him look like he has tiny feet. And we know how neurotic Trump is about the size of his appendages.

Thats how Trump ends up with giant floppy trousers with all that material around the thigh – his tailor is trying to reconcile the differences in size between the top and the bottom. He has to taper out 4 inches to balance out his belly. Thats where the big flappy floppy bits round his thighs come in.

To make things worse he wears a light weight Italian fabric, which must be cool and breathable for a fat lad who sweats a bit, but makes everything a bit crumpled and scruffy. He would be better off with a light breathable English wool, but there you go. At least it would hang well, and crease less.

A waist that size creates problems for the jacket. The most obvious one is the way his jacket gapes when he sits down because his tummy flops forward. He really should undo his jacket when he sits down, but he keeps his buttoned, because he thinks that it hides his belly.

He tries to disguise his tummy by wearing his tie too long. A tie should stop just on top of the belt, but Trump’s flops right down. I can’t decide if this is Trump revealing his anxiety about the size of his tummy or his willy.

But Trumps tailoring problems don’t end there; he has a serious problem of proportion. Most mens suits are cut with a 6 inch difference between waist and shoulderss – a 36″ waist matches a 42″ chest. I used to swim a lot and I have an 8″ difference – 36″ waist, 44″ chest.

For comparison this is what a 6″ difference should look like;

Trumps tummy is so big that his jacket would need to be over 50″ round the chest for his jacket to match properly, and not even Donald’s moobs aren’t that big. Instead he has a 44″ jacket with a 42″ waist, which is why his shoulders seem small and cramped. He is out of proportion.

I hope that no-one feels that this is just fat shaming. There are lots of well dressed stylish men who have larger waist sizes. They just find ways of carrying it. Trump looks badly dressed because he is a fat guy who still thinks he is a thin guy and hasn’t adapted his dress to it. He is in denial about his weight.

This is the central problem. Trump isn’t honest with himself about his body shape, and goes to strange lengths to hide it. That lack of honesty carries over into his political and professional life. He isn’t honest with himself, or with anyone. Anyone can see that by looking at his trousers.

Boris Johnson has a similar problem. He affects not to care about his appearance, but his sloppy suit is an attempt to hide his paunch, and his wacky haircut hides a hairline that has receded so far it’s probably in a different constituency. His scruffiness carries an implicit snobbery – rules are for the little people, not for him.

At least he doesn’t go as far as Dominic Cummings who tries to dress like a normal person but who has so little familiarity with normal people he ends up looking like a posh kid going to a working class fancy dress party.

The craziest part of all of this?

Trump’s unsuccessful business ventures include his own menswear range

It least it did better than his exclusive range of fragrances: