OS ANGELES - Her shoes mean he's not serious, not yet at least.
For two days, while presidential maybe Donald Trump made nice in Los Angeles, his model girlfriend teetered beside him on pointy, strappy stilettos. She stood on them, she walked on them, she hardly winced when the crowd circling Trump yesterday gained momentum and she briefly fell behind.
But if Trump wants to keep pace with the other presidential contenders, model Melania Knauss will at some point have to forgo fashion for comfort. No one can run in her shoes. And in Los Angeles, The Donald insisted anew that he is seriously contemplating a run at the Reform Party nomination.
In California for the first time since forming a presidential exploratory committee, the famous developer and the exquisite but relatively unknown girlfriend he likes to describe as a ''supermodel'' had a get-acquainted session with party leaders, dropped in on ''Tonight Show'' host Jay Leno, and took an abbreviated tour of the Museum of Tolerance.
Sounding like a candidate (lambasting the competition, Patrick Buchanan in particular), acting like a candidate (thanking museum officials by name), and looking like one, too (conservative navy suit), Trump even had red-white-and-blue press badges printed up for the events.
Still, he showed his usual aversion to shaking hands (very uncandidate-like). Before a news conference Monday, volunteers distributed sanitizing lotion to reporters, the bottle top emblazoned with Trump's Web address (www.donaldjtrump2000.com).
Trump's presence - not to mention Knauss' - drew nearly 100 Reform Party leaders and activists to a Beverly Hills hotel, where rooms start at $300 a night, and more than a half-dozen TV cameras to the Museum of Tolerance, where admission is $8.50 for adults, $5.50 for students. He requested both sessions, the former resulting in a raucous Q&A with party members, the latter in a forum to announce his disdain for intolerance and distance himself from party rival Patrick Buchanan.
''I think Pat Buchanan should come here absolutely,'' Trump said after spending an hour seeing a presentation on the Holocaust and on bigotry in America today. ''This would be a very logical stop for Pat Buchanan. ... His views are so far off ... almost anti-everything.''
Trump, looking surprisingly tall in a city where male celebrities tend to be shorter than expected, crammed a lot of his opinions into two days.
At the L'Ermitage hotel, he riled some Reform Party members by dismissing their platform as unformed and refusing to embrace campaign-finance reform, one of their primary aims. On the ''Tonight Show,'' the billionaire stressed that his proposed one-time tax on anyone with a net worth exceeding $10 million would drive down the national debt, heat up the economy even more, and keep capital in the country. Leno, however, could not resist noting that Trump has never been elected president of anything, not even his fifth-grade class.
Trump responded by listing the positions he has held at his companies, then laughingly agreed with Leno that he ran ''a dictatorship.''
Citing polls of his own that show him a strong contender, Trump said he expects to reach a decision by February. Other polls, however, show him trailing potential primary opponents Buchanan, Ross Perot, and Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura.
Trailing is something Melania Knauss will have to get used to, unless one of Trump's newly hired political consultants suggests a sensible pair of pumps. Then, at least, the schoolchildren who greeted Trump with gleeful shouts but stared blankly at her might recognize her as the country's first potential First Girlfriend.
Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.
