‘America’s Caesar’: Cult satisfied Barron Trump is a time traveller

Urged by his proud father to identify himself to the ecstatic crowd, Barron Trump rose to acknowledge the applause. At 18 and dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and tie, he looked like a younger version of his dad – yet more handsome and even taller at 6ft 7in.

The reception was rapturous: Barron, Trump’s only offspring by third wife Melania, received two standing ovations at Tuesday night’s rally in Florida. As he punched the air and gave the thumbs up, his barely smiling face remained inscrutable.

The ‘very young man’, Trump told his cheering followers, ‘is now going to college – got into every college he wanted to and he made his choice. He’s a very good guy.’

When Barron sat down, his father observed: ‘That’s the first time he’s done it [stood up to acknowledge applause]. That’s the first time, right?… You’re pretty popular. He might be more popular than Don and Eric. We gotta talk about this. Hey Don, we gotta talk about this.’

As Trump’s two older sons, Don Jr and Eric, sitting nearby, grinned weakly, their father added: ‘Welcome to the scene, Barron.’

After the rally, Trump posted photos of Barron waving to the crowd and pumping his fists on Truth Social, the ex-president’s social media site.

As political theatre, it was a fascinating moment.

Trump rarely says anything in jest and his caustic remark about Barron becoming more popular than his 40-something brothers – both campaign stalwarts – will surely have been a calculated move.

Trump knows that Barron has a strange hold on the affections of many of his most hardened supporters. And if there’s anything more outlandish than the personality cult that surrounds him, it’s the one that is rapidly developing around his youngest child.

The conservative commentator Benny Johnson, who has millions of followers on social media’, posted a picture of Barron from this week’s rally, waving at the crowd with the light falling on him as if at a presidential victory parade. ‘Dear liberals,’ Johnson wrote in a post that went viral. ‘This is your future.’

Many of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) foot soldiers who constitute Trump’s political base have been fixated with Barron for some time. The slogan ‘Barron Trump for President 2044’ is so well-established you can buy badges inscribed with it on eBay.

But this week, the tone changed and social media – especially TikTok – erupted in Barron-mania. Comparisons were made with Alexander the Great and Augustus Caesar. One popular Barron meme was a photo of a statue of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, with his face replaced by Barron’s. Another compared his facial profile with that of a statue of Alexander and showed them to look almost identical.

Still others compared him favourably to his father, maximising the continuity between the two.

Another commentator wrote: ‘Regardless of your opinions of Trump, one thing is for certain. Barron has aristocratic physiognomy. There is no denying it. If you placed a crown on his head and a jester in front of him… no one would question it.’

On X, a picture taken in April of Barron at Mar-a-Lago flanked by four young conservative men including steel magnate Justin Waller (a close associate of controversial social media star Andrew Tate) has attracted some 43 million views. Waller captioned it: ‘Let’s take our country back.’

Others pointedly contrasted the clean-cut and unblemished Barron, soon heading to university, with Joe Biden’s troubled son Hunter, 54, who may soon be heading to prison after being convicted of lying over his drug use when buying a gun.

Inevitably, there’s also a fair amount of social media excitement about tall, handsome Barron, especially on TikTok and Instagram, from girls who simply think he’s ‘hot’. He’s even a star on ‘fan fiction’ websites such as Wattpad, where girls and gay teenage boys write romantic and sometimes sexually explicit stories about him.

What Barron thinks of all this, or of being compared to Alexander the Great and hailed as ‘the future’ of America, is anyone’s guess. He has no social media accounts, has never given an interview and he – or rather his mother – recently declined an invitation for him to serve as one of the delegates cementing Trump’s presidential nomination at this month’s Republican Party Convention.

It’s rumoured he has a keen interest in politics but those who know him say his personality is very different from his father’s.

‘I cannot stress enough how kind and polite Barron is… he’s just a great kid,’ Stephanie Grisham, former White House Press Secretary and Melania’s one-time chief-of-staff told me earlier this year.

Grisham added that she saw a ‘definite difference’ between Barron and his much older half-siblings – Ivanka, Donald Jr, Eric and Tiffany.

‘Just very, very kind and humble and empathetic and smart,’ Grisham added. ‘Not that I’m saying his half-siblings aren’t smart.’

Barron has a unique place in the hearts of some Trump fans – and for a reason that frankly defies belief.

Mike Rothschild, an expert on Right-wing conspiracy theories, has described what he calls a ‘weird little cult of personality’ around Barron that predates his appearance at this week’s rally.

In 2017, internet users discovered surprising coincidences involving President Trump and his young son – and a series of obscure children’s novels written in the 1890s by US writer Ingersoll Lockwood.

The books described the magical adventures of a precocious time-travelling boy called ‘Baron Trump’ who lives in a large home called Castle Trump and even has a mentor called ‘Don’ (rather than Donald) Fum.

These cherry-picked details helped spawn a bizarre theory – eagerly taken up by pro-Trump tin-foil hatters – that Donald and Barron are time-travellers and that Barron will one day become an all-conquering ‘American Caesar’.

It’s worth remembering that conspiracist thinking lies at the heart of Trump’s appeal. Some 15 per cent of Americans – figures equivalent to a major religion – subscribe to the ‘QAnon’ conspiracy theory, which holds that Satan-worshipping paedophiles secretly run the U.S. government and that Trump has been appointed to expel them.

Trump himself has boasted that QAnon followers ‘love our country’ and ‘like me very much‘. Fewer than half of Americans explicitly reject QAnon and large numbers also believe that ‘American patriots may have to resort to violence’ to depose the paedophiles and restore the country’s rightful order.

In this context, the arrival of 18-year-old Barron as a kind of boy prince set to continue the Trump dynasty when his 78-year-old father is gone has powerful resonance.

‘A lot of fringe-dwelling MAGA people took these obscure [Ingersoll Lockwood] books as proof that Trump’s presidency was some kind of time-travel experiment or foreseen in the past,’ Rothschild has said.

The idea that Barron might be ‘the avenger who will make the Trump line permanent once he comes of age’ has developed more recently, he added.

That image, he believes, is bolstered by Barron’s imposing physical presence. ‘Barron is tall, has a really defined chin and never speaks – he’s perfect as their silent avenger,’ said Rothschild.

If you can believe that the Trumps are the time-travellers foretold in some dusty Victorian children’s stories, it’s surely no stretch at all to swallow the idea that Trump Sr was this week announcing his intended successor.

That said, the ex-president could do with some photogenic company on the campaign trail.

Barron’s mother Melania, 54, has been conspicuously absent, as has Trump’s fragrant daughter Ivanka. Once the apple of his eye, she and husband Jared Kushner were senior advisers in his White House administration but have since distanced themselves politically from Trump.

Meanwhile, Donald Jr and Eric are both deeply uncharismatic, while their half-sister Tiffany is politically unengaged. So only Barron is left to lead Trumpism after Trump.

And he has no shortage of politically well-connected fans. Two months ago, Patrick Bet-David, an Iranian-American businessman and conservative political commentator, called Barron ‘the most interesting 18-year-old I’ve ever met’.

James Golden, talk radio show producer and sidekick of conservative political commentator Rush Limbaugh, says Barron ‘oozes charm and political acumen’.

Trump himself, who reportedly avoids standing too close to his youngest because he cannot bear his son towering over him, has revealed that his ‘smart’ son Barron even gives him political advice.

‘He does like politics. It’s sort of funny,’ Trump told a Philadelphia radio show in May. ‘He’ll tell me sometimes: ‘Dad, this is what you have to do.’

Some pundits argue that Barron – who has yet to make a single public political statement – serves as a blank slate on which Trumpites can project any fantasy they like.

Part of Barron’s appeal is that he has inherited his mother’s sphinx-like public demeanour. Only last week, a video appeared of Trump candidly discussing politics with a group of supporters on a golf course. As, with characteristic bombast, he described President Biden as an ‘old broken down pile of crap’ and Vice President Kamala Harris as ‘so f***ing bad’ and ‘pathetic’, Barron sat silently beside him in their golf cart, his face giving nothing away.

Like the other Trump children, Barron has enjoyed a cossetted life. In his early years, he had the run of almost an entire floor in New York’s Trump Tower. At night, Melania would slather his skin with her own-brand caviar moisturiser.

Aged five, he announced that he wanted to become a businessman like his father, preferring to wear a suit and tie than jeans and a T-shirt.

‘He is a very strong-minded… He is independent and opinionated, and knows exactly what he wants,’ Melania told a parenting magazine at the time.

Later, he became the first boy to grow up in the White House since JFK Jr in 1963. Barron was effectively shielded from the animosity towards his father by Melania, say insiders, although as he got older he surely couldn’t have been entirely cocooned from every scandal — not least the shocking claims (denied by Trump) by ex-porn star Stormy Daniels that she had a fling with his father just four months after he was born.

After graduating in May from Oxbridge Academy, a £32,000-a-year private school near the family’s resort home at Mar-a-Lago, Florida, now this precocious young man is set to go to an unnamed university.

Wherever he goes, he will have his work cut out living down his anointment as the ‘American Caesar’.