This is part of Hello, Trumpworld, Slate’s reluctant guide to the people who will be calling the shots now—at least for as long as they last in Washington.
In the weeks after the election, two clips of Barron Trump went viral. With one of them, the one you’re more likely to have seen, it’s not hard to get why: A toddler-age Barron talking about his “sootcase” is cute enough on its own, but put a beat behind it and you’ve got a certified TikTok earworm. But the other one, on its face, is just a 17-second clip featuring present-day Barron greeting UFC founder and Trump crony Dana White at one of his father’s campaign events. “Hello. How are you?” you can hear him saying. “It’s very nice to finally meet you.” As the New York Post reported in December, people online seized on this footage because it marked the first time many of them had ever heard Barron’s adult speaking voice.
To this day, most people have never heard Barron talk, or if they have, it was as a little kid with a Slovenian accent. Beyond those two clips, you’re not going to find many more examples out there of the first kid speaking. This is as good an illustration as any of one of the most striking things about Barron Trump, which is just how little we know about him, given how famous he is and what role he could be poised to take on in Trumpworld as he comes of age.
In many ways, it makes sense that Barron didn’t emerge as more of a character in the first Trump administration; he was all of 10 years old on Inauguration Day 2017. There were certainly more than enough other characters to focus on at the time, Trump’s adult children very much among them. But it’s also strange that we don’t know more, now, about who 18-year-old Barron is and what he’s like. Think back to how much we knew about the Obama girls when they were growing up—how much their father spoke about them, their interests, their family life, their dog—and compare that to how much we know about Barron via his father. It’s not a whole lot! Most of what we do know comes from his mother, Melania Trump.
Here’s are the basic facts of Barron: He’s in his freshman year as a student at New York University, unlike most of his older siblings, who opted to attend their father’s alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. (Eric is the only other one who didn’t graduate from Penn; he went to Georgetown.) Barron is, however, keeping with the family tradition by studying business. Rather than living in the dorms, he lives at Trump Tower. Though there will be a room for him in the White House to visit, his mother recently told Fox News, he is expected to stay in New York to further his studies. People magazine experimented with painting him as a “ladies man” in December, but almost nothing is known of his social or romantic life. TMZ has suggested he does a lot of his socializing via gaming chat rooms.
Also, he is very, very tall, at 6-foot-7. Possibly the tallest presidential offspring in American history—we’re still waiting for a fact-check on that.
Toward the end of the presidential race, the media identified Barron Trump as the “architect” behind his father’s podcast strategy, which saw the onetime devotee of more traditional media appearing on a bunch of shows that targeted Gen Z men. I remember being especially amused by this wording: 18-year-olds are rarely the architect of much more than dinners of boxed pasta and store-bought sauce. Was anyone really going to buy him as some kind of power broker? We still don’t know how much it actually mattered that Donald Trump went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and Kamala Harris didn’t, but given how much discussion there was about young men and podcasts in the days and weeks following Harris’ loss, the whole podcast question took on an outsize importance in the discourse, and therefore Barron did too. To me, it’s possible that he’s a new media mastermind and a future force to be reckoned with, but it’s much more likely that he’s just a kid. Again, we really don’t know a single thing about him yet, other than that he’s tall and can form sentences.
Judging from the huge reaction the “sootcase” video brought on, people are excited for Barron to emerge as a Gen Z main character. Personally, I’m actively hoping this doesn’t happen. I want him to stay out of the spotlight. Worst-case scenario, he’s the American conservative Lisan al Gaib, destined to lead young people to an even scarier political place than our current one. Best-case scenario, he follows in the footsteps of his sister Tiffany and becomes someone his dad only occasionally seems to remember exists.
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