Donald Trump’s youngest son, and his only child shared with Melania Trump, has remained largely out of the public eye to the extent that any child of a former president could. That is, until recently. Barron Trump, just 18 years old, is now a freshman at New York University and aspiring political advisor to his father.
Over the past two weeks, my TikTok For You page has been filled with posts from New York University students posting clips of Barron Trump attending class as if he was Sasquatch: The videos are all blurry and hastily shot, and mostly show classmates trying to track down the once-elusive Trump. These cryptic videos, with shaky camera angles set to songs like Chamillionaire’s “Ridin,” are everywhere, culled from “day in my life”-style student videos and reposted on Barron’s dozens of fan accounts on TikTok and Instagram.
These posts have been viewed millions of times and look like paparazzi photos. You can see from the camera angle that the people filming are trying to hide their cameras under backpacks or sweaters. New kinds of Barron’s Memes have prospered.
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“I feel like Barron could have gone to any school, but the fact that he chose one of the most liberal schools in the country speaks volumes,” Grace Rowley, a New York University student who posted about Barron on TikTok, told me. “I was shocked and very intrigued that he chose NYU. I would love to talk to him and read his essay, ‘Why NYU?’”
This type of projection has been part of Barron’s history for years.
Before September, Barron was an enigma. He had no social media accounts and rarely made public appearances. For eight years, his personal life and interests were left to the public’s imagination. In 2020, rumors spread on TikTok that his classmates at the time had identified his Roblox username, “JumpyTurtlee.” The account’s bio indicated that the user was an anime and K-pop fan and supported LGBTQ+ rights. While the rumor was never confirmed, it became part of Barron’s online mythos. Users would capture clips of him looking gloomy and making him seem unhappy and despising his father, then post them under the hashtag #savebarron2020.
Barron has been the subject of dozens of fan fictions on sites like Archive of Our Own and Wattpad, and on fan accounts that recycle the same clips and images over and over again. As Slate reporter Luke Winkie noted earlier this year,Barron has become a blank canvas onto which anyone with even the slightest interest in the Trump family can project their own “fantasies.”