United States: Barron Trump, the rich child who never had a nanny
Like the other children of presidents, the descendant of Donald Trump has been the target of numerous attacks from the enemies of his father. "He's a very strong boy," nevertheless assures Melania, who dedicates her time to her education and has been able to count on the help of her own parents to help her. By SILVIA CRUZ LAPEÑA.
“One of the worst things in the world is to be the son of a president,” wrote Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd American head of state, and father of six children. This was not, however, a gratuitous whining. Years and a book on the subject have proven him right. Supporting figures and stories confirmed that these children had enormous privileges, but also faced hardships that they were not always able to face.
The book in question is signed Doug Wead, political adviser, and is the result of an investigation commissioned by his leader: George Bush senior, worried about the excesses of his offspring. It was 1988 and the conclusion of this commission was a 44-page document, which showed that some children were, in the long run, more likely than others to suffer from certain problems - divorces, alcoholism and premature death.
The derivative work of this investigation was published in 2003, which is why it does not include the case of Barron Trump, who is still too young (he is 14) to know whether he will suffer or at least contrary, if he will profit from having been the "first child" of the United States. What we know of his childhood does not seem at first sight to be an ordeal, even if everything we know has been told to us by people other than him, including his parents. We therefore ignore his version of what life is like as the son of President Donald Trump.
One thing is clear: if his father is re-elected on November 3, Barron will reach majority in the White House, where he will have lived from the age of 10 to 18, a key stage in the development of each individual, and he We will have to see how this experience will impact his future. For the moment, the only thing we know is a detail of his past, marked by the egotism of his parent even in the birth certificate: John Barron is the pseudonym that Trump used in the 90s to tell the media about his sexual exploits. With this nickname, pretending to be a so-called press officer for his companies, he called journalists to inform them of his romances with celebrities, and even revealed the names of his conquests: Madonna is one of between them. This masquerade did not deceive anyone: everyone knew who was hiding behind this pseudonym, but that did not prevent the tycoon from naming his fifth child, born March 20, 2006, the fruit of his union with Melania, his third wife.
A family matter
Very young, the child already shows that he has character. It is the butler of the family, Anthony Senecald who remembers it. Thus, at five years old, the boy gave him an “Anthony, you are fired”. He said it when the housekeeper came in one morning to serve him breakfast. The injunction mimicked the one his father used on The Apprentice, a reality show that showed contractors being kicked out of the contest with the phrase Barron used that day, instead of a hello to his butler, as he was still just a toddler.
Senecald also gave details to The New York Times about how the Trump children were raised. For example, in the Mar-a-Lago villa, where they ran like wild beasts, to the library which contained priceless old books, "that no one in the family had read", and that Trump ended by transforming into a bar. His mother, however, did everything possible to ensure that the young boy was educated. For this, she insists that he speaks French and Slovenian, his native language, which his grandparents Viktor Knavs and Amalija are responsible for transmitting to him.
Melania's parents are a constant presence in Barron's life, as her father and mother explain to People magazine, to whom they gave their first interview as new occupants of the White House. If they don't have a nanny, it's because they don't want someone else to take care of their boy. This is why Melania's parents, who have had American nationality since 2018, follow them as much as possible in their travels on board Air Force One.
Between father and mother
The grandparents spend a lot of time at Mar-a-Lago, where the Trumps come to rest. They are also traveling with their grandson to New York, where he has his own apartment in Trump Tower. And in Washington, where he studied at Saint Andrew's Episcopal School, an educational center where many modern-day entrepreneurs, such as Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, were trained. Barron is therefore the first child of a president in more than three decades not to study at the Sadweelks School, where Malia and Sasha Obama were educated. In order to explain why the young boy was sent to this school, which costs around 40,000 dollars a year, Melania showed off the diversity card. Indeed, according to the school's website, 40% of the students are from a minority and we "respect all religious denominations". While she was making this statement, her husband was saying something quite different: “I think Islam hates us”. This was not a slip-up: as demonstrated by the website Medium, the president of the United States and father of Barron made 86 times openly Islamophobic remarks.
His parents think, or at least say they think they have separate opinions on important matters. But they also have a very different role in Barron's upbringing. Thus, his maternal grandparents are very present in his life, but his father is not so much. What Melania's ex-friend and advisor Stephanie Winston Wolcott says in her book "Melania and Me" is that the First Lady's priority has always been her son, while Donald is a busy father. One of the few phrases related to his paternal role, found in the media, is the following: “I have always forbidden my children to take drugs, drink alcohol or smoke. You start and then you can't stop."
It is up to Melania to take responsibility for the child, to whom her husband pays little attention: “He is busy, and I take care of Barron. What is important in a couple is to know who takes care of what", she says in the magazine Parenting, where she explains that it is she who is responsible for ensuring that the father and the son is spending time together, dining together or playing golf. “He deeply admires his father. He wants to become like him”, says the first lady who speaks of him as a “little Donald”, a nickname linked to their resemblance which is not only physical.
Few friends, many attacks
If Barron has friends, public opinion does not know them. Nothing is known of his links with other teenagers of the "Lucky Sperm Club", heirs and heiresses of powerful families such as the Bloombergs, the Vanderbilts or the Johnsons, a group to which Robert Wood Johnson V belongs. This child, also late, is that of a friend of her father, Woody Johnson, United States Ambassador to England and ex-actress Suzanne Ircha, daughter of Ukrainian immigrants and friend of Melania since the Slovenian arrived in the United States in the 90s.
Even if the privacy of the adolescent is amply protected, there is an impression of loneliness from the few questions asked about him to his parents. “He really likes to play alone,” his mother replies when asked how he spends his free time. Her older sister, Ivanka, also shared that her brother spends most of his time at the White House with his nephews and cousins.
Tension and harassment
In his book on the children of presidents, Doug Wead explains that personally, the greatest pain for a president is when his children are used to attack him. It happened to Trump and his predecessors more than once. In this case, we do not count the criticisms addressed to Ivanka Trump or her husband, Jared Kushner, who are not only family members, but many employees of the White House.
But Barron is still too young to enjoy the ease — dedicating himself to politics — that being a child of a president offers. This is why the criticisms and the attacks of which he is the victim are more like what we could have suffered Malia and Sasha Obama, who had to endure the lessons given by a Republican adviser, who ridiculed them by demanding " a little more class” dress, or the comments of a TV presenter who spoke of the sexual preferences of young girls, still minors. For Barron, the teasing began when his father entered the White House. The boy's gestures have been the butt of memes, jokes and comments of all kinds, with no one seeming to remember that he was actually a 10-year-old child.
Some differences
Last year, Donald Trump was subject to impeachment proceedings, to which his son's name was attached. "Trump can call his son Barron, that won't make him a baron," said Stanford University professor Pamela Karlan. Melania bared her fangs: "You should be ashamed of your complacency and bias and using a child to do this," she wrote on social media, a comment her husband shared, after which the White House sent out a press release asking that we respect "the long tradition of keeping children out of the debate." »
But this tradition does not exist. Although it is not normal to attack the children of presidents, it has happened many times. Harassment suffered by Malia and Sasha Obama, Jenna and Barbara Bush and of course Chelsea Clinton, who, aged 12, had to listen to presenter Rush Limbaugh compare her physically to a dog. It is moreover the daughter of Hillary Clinton who fights the most against these attacks: “Leave him alone. Let Barron be a child, he has the right. Actress Rosie O'Donnell also broke that rule when she claimed Barron had autism. This statement provoked an extremely violent reaction from Donald Trump: "He's a good boy, leave him alone," said the president, who nevertheless cheerfully insults minors, like Greta Thunberg.
The way Barron is treated is not very different from that of other children of presidents and this is precisely one of the keys that Wead analyzes in his book: the media pressure that they have to bear, particularly when they are still children. However, there are still two things that differentiate the case of Cadet Trump from previous cases. One is that aside from impeachment, Barron has been the target of comedians. But not journalists, nor important figures of the United States, nor rivals of his father. The other difference is that these comments have had consequences that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.
One example is Saturday Night Live screenwriter Katie Rich. In 2017, she tweeted: "Barron will be the first homeschooled child to have a shooting at his school." The next day she was kicked out. In 1977, that same show aired a gag that ridiculed Amy Carter, the daughter of the 39th President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, on her way to her school, a public institution made up mostly of African Americans. The skit's protagonist was nine years old at the time, and show producer Lorne Michaels recalls that no one was fired, and no one complained.
Do we protect minors more today? Are we all — spectators, politicians, journalists — more sensitive than 40 years ago? Or does the current public debate, built on half-truths and insults, to which Barron's father contributes so much, have a role in this?
