For a young man who has spent so much of his life kept fiercely out of the spotlight, Barron Trump made his TV debut at a shockingly young age.
He was just two months old when his proud parents allowed Gayle King – then working on The Oprah Winfrey Show – to come and coo over him in the baroque splendor of their $100 million penthouse in Trump Tower.
But first, Melania Trump dutifully gushed over her husband’s paternal instincts: ‘He’s amazing, you know. He takes [Barron] in the morning when he wakes up. And he brings him in his room and they’re watching TV together and they’re reading the papers.’
Then it was off to baby Barron’s grand nursery, a corner room with sweeping views of Manhattan and stuffed full of huge soft toys, where The Donald borrowed his son – dressed in a flouncy old-fashioned baby boy dress – from the nanny so he could hold him for the cameras.
‘See the little delicate hands,’ said the business tycoon who would one day be mocked over the small size of his own hands.
Then King got down to the tough questions.
‘So Donald, you’re not opposed to changing diapers, you just haven’t had to do it,’ she quizzed. ‘But you know how to do it?’
‘I would be able to do it, yes,’ replied the father of five.
But before King had time to ask him to prove it, Barron started wailing and a relieved-looking Trump passed him back to his mother.
Eighteen years later, Barron is rather bigger – at 6’7, he looms over his 6’3 father – but still very much tied to Mom.
He comes of age today, after a high-profile childhood that, if physically pampered, cannot have been emotional plain-sailing with such a polarizing man for a dad.
The first boy to grow up in the White House since JFK Jr in 1963, he has lived through scandal after scandal – shielded, as best she could, by a highly protective mother.
In January 2018, he was not yet 12 when the media was engulfed by porn star Stormy Daniels’s bombshell claims that she had an affair with Donald just four months after Barron was born.
During his presidency, Trump’s most ardent critics even resorted to criticizing the young boy as a means of attacking his father.
Comedian Rosie O’Donnell, who had reason to hate Trump for once calling her a ‘pig’ and a ‘degenerate’, shared a video in 2016 making wild and totally unfounded claims that Barron had autism.
O’Donnell later publicly apologized to Melania, but the damage was already done. The following year, during Trump’s inauguration, SNL writer Katie Rich tweeted: ‘Barron will be this country’s first homeschool shooter’.
In fact, the slurs hurled at Barron got so bad, that another former First Child – from across the aisle – spoke up on his behalf.
Chelsea Clinton tweeted: ‘Barron Trump deserves the chance every child does-to be a kid.’
And Trump Sr deserved the chance to be a dad.
Although he would boast in 2015 that ‘I’ve always prided myself on being a good father’, biographers say he agreed with Melania that if she had a child, he wouldn’t be actively involved in their day-to-day upbringing. (Trump wasn’t even in the delivery room, although he suggested ‘Barron’ as a name).
Melania had help when Barron was very small, but she later insisted on raising him largely by herself – with considerable assistance from her Slovenian parents.
While some – Melania included – claimed to see a strong resemblance between Donald and Barron, nicknamed ‘Little Donald’, when he was a baby, others now insist that in one crucial respect he’s very different.
‘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 DailyMail.com.
Grisham added that she saw a ‘definite difference’ between Barron and his much older half-siblings – who include Ivanka, Donald Jr, Eric and Tiffany.
‘Just very, very kind and humble and empathetic and smart,’ Grisham said. ‘Not that I’m saying his half-siblings aren’t smart at all.’
That also doesn’t mean to say that Barron missed out on the same cosseted upbringing enjoyed by his elder siblings, who have earned something of a reputation for being a chip off the Trump block.
Melania has always indulged Barron, admitting that she allowed him to draw on the walls of his playroom for fear of stifling his creativity.
‘His imagination is growing and important,’ she told Parenting magazine in 2012, adding that – as fitting his grandiose name – young Baron had an entire floor of Trump Tower to himself.
At night, Melania would slaver his skin with her own-brand caviar moisturizer.
And at 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 Parenting mag.
In 2016, when Barron was 10, she did another interview, this time with Us Weekly, telling the publication that she was at home ‘most of the time’ with Barron, ‘giving him morals and tradition and teaching him values’.
According to Stephanie Grisham, for family-oriented Melania, Barron always ‘came first’.
‘She did things very much her way,’ Grisham added. ‘But she also did a great job in keeping him shielded from a lot of the animosity.’
Barron was educated at a succession of the smartest and most expensive private schools, including Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where his mother would take him to and from school in a chauffeured SUV.
She’d also cook his breakfast every morning and prepare his lunch.
He was still only 10 when his father became President and, as First Lady, Melania had to contemplate giving up the very private and independent existence she cherished in New York.
She famously insisted on staying in the Big Apple for almost the first five months of the presidency – with Trump alone in DC – so Barron could finish his school year.
Trump said he was sympathetic – claiming that his son found the idea of leaving his friends and his Manhattan comfort zone ‘a little scary’. That feeling cannot have been improved when, after anti-Trump protesters started picketing Trump Tower, Melania had the Secret Service take over doing the daily school run.
Melania continued to break with White House convention in not sending Barron to the Quaker school, Sidwell Friends, where previous presidential children including the Clintons, Bushes and Obamas had all been educated.
Instead, the Trumps plumped for Barron attending the $50,000-a-year St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in one of DC’s smartest suburbs in Potomac, Maryland.
Some Trump critics couldn’t resist taking it out on Barron, mocking his hair, clothes and towering height, which one wit compared to two kids inside a trench coat.
However, Barron soon found an early distraction from the pressures of First Child life in soccer. In 2017 he joined the Under-12 division of professional team DC United, playing in midfield and impressing players of the main team with his in-depth knowledge of the sport.
His other interests include sneakers – he has an impressive collection – and computers. In fact, his father claimed 2022 that Barron was rapidly able to break into his laptop when it locked him out during a conference that year.
So much younger than his siblings that he was effectively an only child, Barron gets on best with Tiffany, say insiders.
He soon became bilingual, learning to speak his mother’s native Slovenian so well that he could phone his grandmother – who died in January – and not have to resort to English during their conversations.
Melania’s parents, Viktor and the late Amalija Knavs (a former car dealer and textile worker respectively), moved from Slovenia to New York in 2017, before following their daughter to DC and later – after Trump left office – to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach.
They were very close to Barron and are said to have been ‘instrumental’ in his upbringing, an insider told People last year.
In March this year, the magazine confirmed what appeared to have long been obvious from his rare public appearances – that Barron shares his mother’s personality.
‘Barron is shy and reserved, and she has been a good mother to him all of these years,’ a source said.
As for his relationship with Donald, White House chronicler Michael Wolff controversially claimed in 2019 that Trump resented his son for becoming taller than him, adding: ‘His son is effectively not at all a part of his life.’
But Stephanie Grisham – who saw the family in an intimate setting – strongly disputes any perception of the father-son relationship as hostile or distant.
‘I saw Barron spend a lot of time with his father in the [White House] residence,’ she said. ‘I would see them joke around quite a bit.’
If he was a rare sighting during Trump’s presidency, Barron has been seen even less since he moved with his parents to Mar-a-Lago.
He is due to graduate this year from the nearby $41,500 Oxbridge Academy. The school was founded in 2011 by billionaire William Koch, brother to Republican super-donors Charles and David Koch (who last year deserted Trump to back his nomination rival Nikki Haley).
What’s next for Barron?
Insiders say he will be going to college but won’t speculate on where or other future plans.
‘Did you know when you were 17?’ asked a source. One confident prediction has been made however: wherever Barron goes next, his mother will want to move with him.
Emily Foster is a globe-trotting journalist based in the UK. Her articles offer readers a global perspective on international events, exploring complex geopolitical issues and providing a nuanced view of the world’s most pressing challenges.
