The Greatest Fantasy About Barron Trump Was Just Thoroughly Shattered
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The most admirable thing about Donald Trump’s very tall youngest son, Barron Trump, has long been that he keeps a low profile. Unlike his siblings and family members, he isn’t on social media (as far as we know), he isn’t selling anything (ditto), and he isn’t trying to be the face of MAGA for his generation (so far). Most people have literally never heard the 19-year-old New York University student speak, apart from the old clip of him saying “sOOtcase” that went viral last year. It was possible to imagine that he was the rare innocent bystander in Trumpworld, someone who truly didn’t deserve to be lumped in with the rest who actually choose to be there.
Barron has hereby punctured this fantasy. He’s a Trump all right.
A New York Times report published on Wednesday has given us a rare glimpse into what Barron does with his free time, and it’s the most depressing possible revelation: He shoots the shit on Zoom with people like accused sex trafficker and manosphere influencer Andrew Tate.
Tate and his brother, Tristan, were until recently barred from leaving Romania, where they were under investigation for allegedly pressuring women into pornography; Andrew was also accused of rape and having sex with and beating a minor. The Times’ reporting contends that the Trump administration helped secure the Tate brothers’ freedom earlier this year, with Barron being just one of the insiders with whom the brothers forged a convenient relationship. Barron, according to the Times, “admired” Andrew Tate, and spoke to him last year “while the teenager was having a suit fitted.” (Incidentally, the tailor he was working with got a weird amount of press earlier this year.) On the call, Barron and Andrew “discussed their shared belief that the Romanian criminal case was an effort to silence the Tates,” per the Times.
All of it is obviously vile, but there’s something particularly dispiriting about Barron’s little Zoom date. Up until now, Barron was a fairly sympathetic figure: I certainly wouldn’t want Donald and Melania as my parents, and it can’t be easy to withstand all the attention and scrutiny that comes with being a first kid. Barron feeding into Tate’s hateful, violent politics—which are genuinely corrosive, with even figures like Ron DeSantis and Megyn Kelly rejecting them—is bad enough, but it’s more than that: I find it pathetic, on a personal level, that someone would choose to spend their youth this way. (Sadly, I know Barron isn’t alone here.) This is the life of one of the most privileged 19-year-olds on the planet? Getting fitted for suits while chatting with accused sex criminals, like a Patrick Bateman on his sigma male grindset? It’s complete loser behavior.
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Since Barron turned 18 and the 2024 presidential election put his family back in the spotlight, there have been occasional reports about his political beliefs and the bigger role he was supposedly taking in his father’s campaign, but most of them were easy enough to brush aside. The notion of Barron as an “architect” of the campaign’s strategy to appeal to young male voters, for example, sounded like little more than a bunch of hot air about how smart Barron was, likely either originating from his father or aimed at pleasing him. Self-promoting right-wing podcasters and streamers were eager to brag about their friendships with Barron, but little if any of it was independently confirmed. If Barron was truly passionately MAGA-fied, why wasn’t he taking a more visible role in the campaign?
As he continued to stay out of the public eye, even as College Republicans at his own school made overtures to him, I hoped that he would stay out of politics altogether. Nope. He’s gone to the dark side. Maybe he’s been on the dark side. The little boy who liked his suitcase has become a teenager who likes his alleged sex traffickers.
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