Vanity Fair’s Shocking Profile of Barron Trump

My first celebrity crush was Christie Brinkley. “National Lampoon’s Vacation” in ‘83 — that red Ferrari — her skinny-dipping scene — c’mon, I’m only human.

A few years later, when that rat-fink Billy Joel stole her from me, I thought two things: First, I gotta learn how to play the piano! Then, when they had a baby girl, I remember feeling bad for their kid. Her parents’ skill sets were so dramatically different, and it’s always a crapshoot how all that genetic material will mix together.

What if she looks like Billy and sings like Christie?

I mean, if your mom is a world-famous supermodel, wouldn’t it be awful if everyone always reminded you how much you look like your dad?

(For the record, their real-life daughter seems to be a lovely and talented young lady.)

Bottom line? It’s tough being a kid with celebrity parents. Before you even hit puberty, everyone’s judging you (and/or mocking you), putting you in a situation you never asked to be in.

And it’s even tougher when the parents are political celebrities. Now, not only must you worry about the gossip-mongers and celeb-stalkers, but you have the whole dynamic of political interlopers, special interest groups, and partisan character assassins. It’s just a brutal, unforgiving environment for parents who value normalcy.

In our current MAGAverse, we’ve seen an influx of cute, adorable, photogenic children. There are the Vance kids, Elon Musk’s kids, and, of course, Barron Trump. But it seems the youngest (and tallest) Trump has graduated from “cute and adorable” to “hot and studly” — at least, so sayeth the savvy scribes at Vanity Fair.

And just in time for Valentine’s Day, too!

Their recent profile on the first son — and New York University’s big(gest) man on campus — “The Education—and Anointment—of Barron Trump” was eye-opening for multiple reasons.

It was glowing. Positive. Supportive. Encouraging.

In short, it was the kind of story that Democratic “first families” receive all the time but are almost never bestowed on conservatives. If a Democratic First Lady wears even an iota of makeup, she’s instantly a fashion icon. (And if her husband doesn’t wear makeup, he’s instantly a “Model of Masculinity.”) That’s been the media’s go-to narrative ever since the sexcapade days of JFK’s Camelot.

Here’s an early paragraph from the Vanity Fair profile:

The podcasters who have dined with Barron at Mar-a-Lago rave about his swagger and romantic eligibility; the president and his aides credit him with strategic mastery as an ambassador to young online men. On social media, where his youth soccer highlights periodically circulate, he is discussed with varying degrees of irony but nearly always in breathless terms. He does not speak publicly nor operate a public social media account, which, by all appearances, has only deepened his mystique. Any view of his true place in the Trump firmament arrives in third-party glances. Melania described him to Fox News as “very vocal” in advising his father, and Elon Musk recounted on X how he spent Thanksgiving “discussing consciousness & video games with Barron.”

Personally, I hope Barron maintains his social media silence. Vanity Fair is right: There’s a majesty to silence. It invites audiences to positively project their own biases and aspirations. Silence is golden (and who values gold more than a Trump?).

Before Lady Di lost her life in a car crash, she was the most popular royal (or ex-royal) anywhere in the Western World, and it was largely via the power of silence. She smiled, waved, and posed with sick children. Her deepest, darkest thoughts were hidden behind a marble mask. You can’t even imagine Lady Di on TikTok or X, bloviating endlessly about politics and culture, trying to out-snark the opposition.

Instead, she was nice. (Seemed nice, at least.) PR-wise, it helped her enormously.

The article continued:

After TMZ reported in December that Barron’s peers knew him as a low-key video game enthusiast, a source quickly emerged to tell People that he was in fact a “ladies’ man.” According to the report, young women of all political persuasions were falling for him. The subject—not, it should be said, a strictly dichotomous one—has been widely litigated, with Eric Trump describing his half brother as the “most eligible bachelor in the world” and one of Barron’s classmates confirming to me that “he definitely is a gamer.” The Daily Mail proposed that conservative 21-year-old influencer Maria Arana, a Mexican American NYU student who grew up in Miami, could make for a suitable “future Mrs Barron Trump.”
“I just thought it was very random,” Arana told me. “But it’s not like I was against it.”

Barron Trump is a tall, single, handsome teenage billionaire celebrity. Now, I’m no “expert” on women, but I suspect there are probably a few ladies who dig those qualities. This is, alas, a double-edged sword: the benefits are obvious (and how!) but it also makes him a target.

Unfortunately, Barron must be just as careful around his “friends” as he is around his enemies. Too many people see him as a cheat code to advance their own interests, and as an 18-year-old kid, he lacks the life experience to identify all the pitfalls.

That’s not a knock on Barron: It’d be a lot for anyone to handle. Not only is he one of the most famous, most instantly identifiable people on the planet, but because of his physical stature, he can’t blend into crowds. He’s always isolated; always standing out. I’m sure he’s learned to constantly keep his guard up.

He has to. Because on the left and the right, who can he trust?

And that’s sad because there’s value in lowering your guard and being vulnerable. You just gotta be very selective when and where you do it because being vulnerable around the wrong person will wreck your life.

Even if you’re a teenage billionaire celebrity.

If Barron Trump manages to navigate the trials and tribulations of young adulthood at New York University and emerge unscathed, it will be a minor miracle. I’m rooting for the kid — so far, so good! By absolutely every meaningful metric, he seems to be an amazing, well-adjusted young man with a blazingly bright future. It’s not at all unreasonable to expect Barron to try his hand at politics one day — and maybe be an American president. The entire country will be watching his every move.

Which is a lot of pressure.

Regardless of whatever his future may hold, in the meantime, I just hope Barron Trump gets to enjoy being a college kid. He deserves it.

Even Vanity Fair recognizes this, which is a shocking turnaround from eight years ago. Back then, when Barron was barely 10 years old, you had Rosie O’Donnell speculating that he’s autistic and “Saturday Night Live” writers tweeting about Barron shooting his parents. The mainstream media viewed conservatives solely through the lens of cruelty, snark, and derision. Their self-appointed role was to attack.

But today, they’re celebrating. That alone is a colossal shift in the culture wars.