BARRON TRUMP, THE RICH BOY WHO NEVER HAD A NANNY
Like other sons of presidents, the scion of Donald Trump has come under attack from his father's enemies. "He is a very strong boy," says Melania, who spends almost all her time educating him and has relied on the help of her own parents to do so.
"One of the worst things in the world is being the son of a president," wrote Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States and father of six children. It was not a sensation, not a gratuitous complaint. The passing of the years and a book on the subject proved him right with figures and life stories that confirmed that these children had many privileges, but also challenges that not all were capable of overcoming.
The book was signed by Doug Wead, political advisor, and was the consequence of a report commissioned by his boss: George Bush Sr., concerned about the drift of some of his offspring. It was 1988 and the result of that commission was a 44-page document that demonstrated that these children were, in the long run, more likely to suffer from certain problems - divorce, alcoholism and premature deaths - than the rest.
The derivative book was published in 2003, so it does not include the case of Barron Trump, who is still too young (14) to know if he will suffer more than he will enjoy the status of having been the "first child" of the United States. What is known of his childhood does not seem, at first glance, an ordeal, although everything we know about him has been told by others, including his parents, so his version of what it is to be the son of President Donald Trump is not known .
One thing is clear: if his father were re-elected on November 3, Barron will come of age in the White House, where he will have lived from 10 to 18, a key stage in the formation of any person and will have to See how that experience will affect your future. At the moment, the only thing known is some detail of his past, marked by his father's egotism even in the birth certificate: John Barron is the pseudonym Trump used in the nineties to explain his sexual prowess to the media. With that nickname, and posing as an alleged press officer of his companies, he called journalists to inform them of his romances with famous people and even gave names: Madonna was one of them. That masquerade was an outcry: everyone knew who was hiding behind that pseudonym, but that did not stop the tycoon when on March 20, 2006 he had to choose the name of his fifth child, the first he had with Melania, his third wife .
Family brand
Since childhood, the boy showed character. It was recalled by the family butler, Anthony Senecald, when he explained that at the age of five he snapped, "Anthony, you're fired." He did so when the clerk came in one morning to serve him breakfast. The child emulated his father, who appeared in The Apprentice, a television program where he was looking for entrepreneurs, who were expelled from the contest with the same phrase with which Barron said good morning to his butler while still a toddler.
Senecald also gave details in The New York Times about how all the Trump children were raised. For example, in the Mar-a-Lago mansion, where they ran like wild beasts even through the library, full of incunabula and ancient books "that no one in the family had read", and that Trump ended up turning into a bar. His mother, however, insists that the boy be educated. That is why she insists that she speak French and Slovenian, the language of her land, which they ensure that she does not forget her maternal grandparents, Viktor Knavs and Amalija.
Melania's parents are a constant presence in Barron's life, who as his parents told in People, where they gave their first interview as tenants of the White House, has never had a babysitter because they do not want anyone to take care of their child. For this reason, Melania's parents, who have had American nationality since 2018, travel with them whenever they can on Air Force One.
Between mom and dad, a swing
Grandparents spend a lot of time at Mar-a-Lago, where the Trumps rest. They also travel with their grandson to New York, where the boy has his own apartment in Trump Tower. And to Washington, where he attends Saint Andrew's Episcopal School, an educational center where successful new-generation entrepreneurs such as Pierre Omidyar, eBay founder, were trained, among other names. Thus, Barron has become the first son of a president in more than three decades not to attend Sadweelks School, where Malia and Sasha Obama were students.
On the occasion of his admission to said center, which costs around 40,000 dollars a year, Melania explained that they had chosen it because of the diversity of its students, because according to what is read on its website, 40% belong to a minority and it is a center where "All religious confessions are respected." In the same days that the first lady made that statement, her husband made a very different one: "I think Islam hates us." It was not a blunder: as the publication Medium showed up to 86 times the country's president and Barron's father clearly promoted Islamophobia.
Her parents don't just think, or say they think, very differently on key issues. His role in Barron's education is also very different. Just as maternal grandparents are present in Barron's life, his father is not so present. As Melania's former friend and former advisor Stephanie Winston Wolcott recounts in the book Melanie and Me, the first lady's priority has always been her son while Donald has been an overly busy father. One of the few phrases collected in the media related to her role as a parent is this: "I have always told all my children that no drugs, alcohol or cigarettes. You start and you cannot leave them."
Melania assumes that responsibility to a greater extent than her husband does not care: "He is busy and I take care of Barron. The important thing in the couple is to be clear about what each one is in charge of," she told Parenting magazine, where she explained that she is the one who makes sure that father and son spend time together, which they usually dedicate to having dinner alone or playing golf. "He admires his father deeply. He wants to be like him," said the first lady, assuring that she refers to him as "little Donald" because of how much they look alike, not just physically.
Few friends, many attacks
If Barron has many friends, public opinion does not know them. It is known of the relationship he has with another teenager from the so-called "Lucky Sperm Club", heirs and heirs of powerful families such as the Bloomberg, the Vanderbilts or the Johnson, a group to which Robert Wood Johnson V belongs. He is a son, also late, from a friend of her father's, Woody Johnson, US ambassador to the UK, and from former supporting actress Suzanne Ircha, daughter of Ukrainian immigrants and friend of Melania since the Slovenian came to the US in the 90s.
Although the privacy of the adolescent is protected to the maximum, of the few questions that his parents have answered about him, a certain loneliness is perceived. "He likes to play alone a lot," his mother answered when asked what her boy spent his free time on. His older sister, Ivanka, has also said that her brother spends a good part of his life in the White House with his nephews and cousins mainly.
Crispation and harassment
In his book on presidential sons, Doug Wead explained that personally, the "greatest pain" of a president is when someone uses his offspring to attack him. It has happened to Trump, like the rest of his predecessors, on more than one occasion. Criticism of Ivanka Trump or her husband, Jared Kushner, does not count in this case, because in their case they are not only family but also work in the White House and that is why the couple and Donald Trump Jr are audited.
But Barron is still too young to enjoy the facility - that of dedicating himself to politics - that comes from being the son of a president. For this reason, the criticism and attacks he receives are more similar to those suffered by Malia and Sasha Obama, who had to endure being ridiculed by a Republican adviser and demanding "a little more class" in their clothing or a television commentator dared to refer to the sexual preferences of two girls who were still minors.
The taunts with Barron began at his father's inauguration. The boy's gestures generated memes, jokes and comments of all kinds, without any of the people who uttered them seem to have in mind that the boy was only 10 years old.
Some differences
Last year, Donald Trump underwent an impeachment in which the name of his young son was sneaked. "Trump can call his son Barron but not a baron," said Stanford University professor Pamela Kalan. Melania went on the attack: "You should be ashamed of your complacency and partial and of using a child to do it," she wrote on her social networks, her husband shared it and the White House sent a statement in which he asked that it be maintained "the long tradition of leaving children out of the debate. "
But that tradition does not exist. That it is not the norm to attack presidential children, does not mean that it has not occurred with all of them. It is a harassment that Malia and Sasha Obama suffered, also Jenna and Barbara Bush and of course, Chelsea Clinton, who at the age of 12 had to listen to how the announcer Rush Limbaugh physically compared her to a dog. Hillary Clinton's daughter is the one who has been the most combative with these attacks on minors: “Leave him alone. Let Barron be a child, he has a right. "
Actress Rosie O'Donnell also crossed that line when she assured that Barron is autistic, a statement that provoked one of Donald Trump's most violent reactions: "He's a good boy, leave him alone," said the president who has no qualms about insulting publicly to a minor like Greta Thunberg.
Therefore, the treatment of Barron is no different from that received by other president's children, and that is precisely one of the keys that Wead analyzes in his book: the pressure of public exposure that they must endure, especially minors. However, there are at least two differences from previous cases. One is that Barron, except for his mention in the impeachment, has been the target of comedians. As far as this magazine has been able to trace, neither from journalists, nor from any figure with institutional weight in the US, nor from politicians from his father's rival party. Another difference with other presidential sons is that these outbursts have had consequences in his case that were unthinkable in another time.
An example is Saturday Night Live writer Katie Rich. In 2017 she published on her social networks: "Barron will be the first school sniper in the country." The next day she was fired. In 1977, that same television space aired a gag in which Amy Carter, daughter of the 39th president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, was ridiculed, attending her school, a public center with an African-American majority. The protagonist of the sketch was then 9 years old and as the program's producer, Lorne Michaels, recalled years later, there were no resignations and no one called to complain.
Are minors now more protected? Is everyone's skin - viewers, politicians, journalists - thinner than 40 years ago? Or does the state of the current public debate, built on half-truths and full of insults, to which Barron's father has contributed so much, has something to do with it?
