Freshly 18, Barron Trump Already Has a Huge Hive of Fans. They’re Even Weirder Than You’d Think.

Barron Trump and Alexander the Great share remarkably similar jawlines. I know this because @CHIZMAGA—a prominent Trump booster on the platform formally known as Twitter—uploaded a pair of images of the youngest scion of the Donald dynasty and a marble sculpture of the panhellenic conqueror, both captured from their profile. They each glare toward the horizon, with a wavy tumble of hair creeping down the back of their necks, looking assuredly masculine and slightly fascistic in their grandeur. The insinuation here is that, within the wildest fantasies of the psychopathic right, Barron is set to inherit the imperial seal of his father.

The boy, who is the only child Donald Trump sired with his third wife, Melania, became a man this past March. Barron is now 18, and thus far he has maintained separation from the political project of his father’s clan, especially compared to Trump’s other sons—Eric and Don Jr.—who have each grifted their way toward conservative celebrity status. Barron is not on Twitter or Instagram, he has never given an interview, and he recently declined an invitation to serve as one of the delegates cementing Trump’s presidential renomination. And yet, despite his remoteness, we are living in the midst of a nascent Barron fandom. The 18-year-old shall be bequeathed with the weight of the Trump legacy, whether he likes it or not.

“There’s always been a weird little cult of personality around him,” said Mike Rothschild, an expert on right-wing disinformation and the author of The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything. Rothschild points to a “time-traveling Barron Trump” conspiracy theory, which originated in an obscure set of children’s novels from the 1890s by Ingersoll Lockwood that starred a precocious young boy named Baron Trump. The Trump of those books has also been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Most of the plot focuses on his adventures in magical realms, where he typically causes a whole bunch of trouble before retiring to his home, Castle Trump.

“A lot of fringe-dwelling MAGA people took these obscure books as proof that Trump’s presidency was some kind of time-travel experiment, or foreseen in the past,” continued Rothschild. But “the idea of him as the avenger who will make the Trump line permanent once he comes of age is a little more recent.”

It is not hard to find evidence for what Rothschild is describing. Consider the ominous sizzle reel made by the MAGA TikTok creator @Jmanny_Official, in which images of a very young Barron are projected over the instrumental from “I Got 5 On It,” by the Bay Area rap duo Luniz. “You don’t think he’s watching the political persecution of his father?” he said. (Jmanny also indulges in some of the heavy-duty time-travel conspiracies Rothschild spoke about. At one point during his video, he floats the idea that Barron is a descendent of the late Princess Diana.) Last weekend, when the New York Post reported that Trump admitted—perhaps half flippantly—that his son sometimes likes to give him political advice, the top response on Twitter was a GIF of Roman centurions hailing their Caesar. (The poster in question uses the name of the East India Company colonialist James Kirkpatrick. Attached to his GIF is a caption that simply reads, “Soon.”) Meanwhile Vince Dao, another routine MAGA poster, is fully on board with this characterization: “I’m totally convinced Barron Trump will be the American Caesar. It’s not a meme at this point.”

You get the idea. Barron has become a locus on which some of the more psychedelic fronts of MAGAdom can project some of their royalist inclinations, which matches up with the overall deprioritization of democratic procedure within an increasingly aberrant Republican Party. Kelly Weill, who wrote a book about conspiracies called Off The Edge, notes that some of the loudest and most apocalypse-oriented deadenders in this contingency also tend to be enthralled with the concept of superior bloodlines—which is leveraged toward anti-immigration policy and pulp-political phantasmagoria alike. (Here is where I remind you that during the Trump alpha wave in 2016, many of his supporters referred to him as the “God Emperor.”)

“[It’s] a right-wing eugenicist tendency,” continued Weill. “This plays out in QAnon-ish spheres that claim Trump is part of Jesus’ ‘bloodline,’ and in Trump’s own comments about immigrants ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ It’s pretty easy for these ideologies to coalesce into something like American royalism, centered around the Trumps.”

The other factor here that must be acknowledged is that Barron Trump is a ridiculous physical outlier. The kid is speculated to be, like, 6-foot-7, complete with a strong frame, which are attributes that have surely buttressed his image as a vengeful conqueror. Imagine if he were a Habsburgian mutant like his half brother Eric—no chance the Republicans would be so eager to hand him the throne. “Despite Trump being massively out of shape, unable to stay awake, and all the other physical and cognitive issues he has, his fans are obsessed with physical strength and traditional good looks,” added Rothschild. “Barron is tall, has a really defined chin, and never speaks—he’s perfect as their silent avenger.”

Rothschild has identified something crucial to Barron’s brand. The boy will remain a cipher—open to all extrapolations—until he opens his mouth and expresses a point of view. Weill believes Barron’s absence from the spotlight is precisely what has cultivated an idolizing force among young men who exist somewhere on the incel spectrum—he comes off as a “quiet stoic” who carries the torch for a certain flavor of cuckolded misanthropy.

But if you look elsewhere, you can even find a burgeoning Barron fandom on softer and more feminine avenues of the internet. There are Barron stan accounts on TikTok and Instagram that celebrate his highly symmetrical face and adjacency to American royalty in the mold of more conventional heartthrobs like Harry Styles or BTS. (“Love his smile,” reads one inscription on a photo of Barron towering over his dad, complete with an infatuated emoji.) More to the point, Wattpad, one of the web’s prime repositories for fan fiction, typically penned by girls and young queers, is home to a wealth of hallucinatory Barron-themed fairy tales. (Here’s one set in an alternative universe where both Hunter Biden and Barron Trump are enveloped in a high-school love triangle.)

“In a lot of the stories, and in the comments posted to them, there is a movement to separate Barron from the rest of the Trump clan by painting him as a kind of sad boy,” said Jessica Hautsch, a professor at the New York Institute of Technology who studies fan communities. “Barron Trump hasn’t been as politically active as the rest of his family, so there is a way to recast him as a privileged romantic partner. It plays with the fantasy of falling in love with a rich boy the author is attracted to, and that maybe he is oppressed by his status, or who his father is.”

In that sense, both the fan-fiction writers and the Donald Trump monarchists have latched on to the only thing we truly know about Barron Trump, which is that like most 18-year-olds in a pressurized environment—under constant surveillance—he is an enigma. The youngest claimant to the throne is set to go to college in the autumn, where he will likely enjoy the social transformation of higher learning, understanding himself better with the combined tools of professorial stewardship and the sublime absence of parental supervision. What will his politics look like afterward? Is he planning a formal debut into society? Does he desire the presidency? A quiet life in the gilded halls of Mar-a-Lago? Will he shock us all and come out strong for a single-payer medical apparatus? Nobody knows, but that won’t stop us from making up stories about the man he’ll soon become.