Everything Donald Trump Revealed About His Son Barron Over The Years

Donald Trump married his third wife, Melania Knauss, in January 2005. Less than a year later, she was pregnant with their first child together. "He came home [one day last August], and I told him he'd be a daddy. And his reaction was ... at first he needed to take it in," Melania told People in 2006. The man who would become one of the most controversial presidents in American history told the magazine, "I expected we were going to have children, so I wasn't totally surprised. But I was surprised by the speed of it. It happened very quickly."

The child in question came to be named Barron. Although older siblings like Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump were heavily involved in their father's administration — the first time around, anyway; Ivanka has chosen to step back from the 2024 campaign — Barron, who was still a kid at the time, mostly stayed out of the spotlight. Now that he's officially an adult, however, his role seems to have changed.

In July 2024, Barron made his campaign rally debut in Doral, Florida. During his speech, Donald suggested the public would be seeing a lot more of his son. "You're pretty popular, he might be more popular than Don and Eric, we gotta talk about this," he quipped, per The Hill. Of course, this wasn't the first time Donald's spoken about his youngest child. Here's what else the former president has said about Barron Trump.

When Barron Trump was a mere 10 weeks old, Donald Trump and Melania Trump gave an interview to The New York Post about their life with a new baby. In particular, Donald confessed that he was letting his wife tend to all diaper-related duties. "I would never ask to change him," the future president said, insisting that Melania wanted it that way. "She loves doing it! I would love to change him! But Melania probably wouldn't let me. I'd just do it wrong." A likely story.

Barron, of course, wasn't Donald's first child; he arrived long after Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Tiffany Trump, and Donald Trump Jr. It had been so long, in fact, that "The Apprentice" host wasn't certain whether he'd helped out with his previous children, either. "I would say I have [changed a diaper]," Donald insisted, "But I can't remember when."

Still, Donald claimed that he was involved in raising his newborn son in different ways. He revealed that every morning, he watched Barron for a few hours, and he even read aloud to the youngster. In true businessman fashion, though, he confessed, "I read the papers."

It's no secret that Donald Trump values business acumen above anything else. After all, he became famous thanks to his high-profile, high-value wheeling and dealing, even publishing a book called "The Art of the Deal." (And hey, if Donald has a few felony convictions that affect his businesses, who's counting?) It makes sense, then, that he would expect his son Barron Trump to grow up and follow in his footsteps into the family business. (The family business, of course, being business.)

What's a little more surprising is just how early Donald claimed his son showed an entrepreneurial spirit. In a video shared by BuzzFeed News from when Barron was still a toddler, Donald praised his youngest child's promising future. "He's strong, he's smart, he's tough, he's vicious, he's violent — all of the ingredients you need to be an entrepreneur," Donald said, showing off his son to the crowd at his Hollywood Walk of Fame star ceremony in 2007. He added, "Most importantly, hopefully he's smart because smart is really the ingredient. So Barron, good luck, you have a long way to go."

When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Barron Trump was only 10 years old. He'd lived in New York City all his life, and the prospect of uprooting everything to move to Washington, D.C., was apparently intimidating to Donald's youngest son. "It's a little scary for Barron. He thinks he is going to be taken away from friends," Donald told People in 2015. "But I tell him if this happens, Daddy will help people, and can help children like him, and that makes him happy."

The following year, after the election, People published more of the president-elect's comments. "He does love New York and he loves his school. Not so much living in the White House. He does like what he's got right now," Donald said. "That would be a whole change of life. But when he hears I'm going to help people that solves the problem."

As a result, for the first few months of Donald Trump's presidency, his family didn't join him at the White House. Instead, Melania Trump stayed behind in New York City with her son, allowing him to finish out the school year. That June, Melania shared a photo of the Washington Monument from the White House on X, formerly Twitter. She captioned it, "Looking forward to the memories we'll make in our new home! #Movingday."

During the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump has invoked his son's name as a way to brag, to talk about how smart he is. More on that below. In 2020, however, he name-dropped Barron Trump's intellect as a way to insult his presidential rival, Joe Biden. The former vice president had just participated in a televised town hall where he took questions from voters, and Donald was none too impressed with Biden's performance. What's more, he seemed to suggest the event was rigged in Biden's favor. "Joe Biden, a week ago, a town hall that was meant for children," Donald scoffed at a rally. "Barron Trump would do great on that show, cause he's a young child. They asked him questions that a child could answer, any child." 

This may seem unlikely on any day, but it's especially tough to imagine a kid taking on a presidential town hall while under the weather. Barron was sick with COVID at the time, and Donald had an answer for that too. "Speaking of Barron Trump," he said, "fully recovered in like, record time."

Barron Trump spent his childhood mostly out of the public eye — as much as possible when you're the son of the president of the United States — but as previously noted, there was a shift when he turned 18 in 2024. Now that he's officially an adult, his father has been more vocal about involving him in politics. In an interview on WHPT, Donald Trump shared, "He does like politics. It's sort of funny, he'll tell me sometimes, 'Dad, this is what you have to do.' So anyway, he's a good guy."

That tracks with what anonymous sources told the Daily Mail. Evidently, Barron and his best friend Bo Loudon have been telling Donald which Gen Z-focused influencers they should try to get on their side. That's why Donald did a livestream with Adin Ross, apparently, which went viral when the streamer gifted the former president a Rolex and a Cybertruck with his face on it. "Trump rates the boys and sees their input as an asset," the source said. 

That's presumably also how Donald heard about comedian and podcaster Theo Von. "My son's a big fan of yours," Donald shared on an August 2024 episode of "This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von." "He knows you very well ... that's where it is nowadays, right?" It seems that that's where we are nowadays: an 18 year old advising a presidential candidate about which influencers he thinks are cool.

In May 2024, Barron Trump was selected to be a delegate at the Republican National Convention, supporting his father's nomination for president. Donald Trump was asked about his son stepping into the political arena during an interview with Telemundo 51 (via ABC News), and he answered, "To me, that's very cute. Because he's a very young guy, and he's graduating from high school this year ... I think that's great. I think it's very interesting, too, but he's pretty young, I will say."

While the 45th president might've found his son's participation in politics "cute," the whole story fell apart almost instantly. First, Telemundo's sister network NBC News published an extended version of the candidate's comments, noting that Donald said, "He's 17, but if they can do that, I'm all for it." Barron was, in fact, 18 at the time.

Several days after the interview, Melania Trump released a statement about her son's participation in the convention. "While Barron is honored to have been chosen as a delegate by the Florida Republican Party," she wrote (via CBS News), "he regretfully declines to participate due to prior commitments." So much for that.

In May 2024, Donald Trump spoke with WHPT about his son's future educational prospects. "He's a smart one," Trump revealed. "He's really been a great student." Nevertheless, he said his son wasn't quite sure where he wanted to attend college, in part because of the pro-Palestinian campus protests that erupted around the country in the wake of the Israeli bombing of Gaza. "Biden has totally lost control of the country," he said, abruptly moving the conversation off of Barron and back on his opponent. 

By September, Donald revealed Barron's university plans in an interview with the Daily Mail. "He was accepted to a lot of colleges," Donald boasted. "He's a very smart guy, and he'll be going to Stern, the business school, which is a great school at NYU." The former president went on, insisting that his son also considered Wharton, the school where he himself went. "We liked NYU. I've known NYU for a long time, but it's one of the highest rated ... I went to Wharton, and that was certainly one that we were considering. We didn't do that. We went for Stern."

Donald also grappled with the notion of his youngest kid entering his next phase of life. "He's a very high aptitude child, but he's no longer a child," he added. "He's just passed into something beyond child-dom."

In July 2024, Donald Trump was speaking at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a gunman opened fire. The former president was nicked in the ear by a bullet, and both the gunman and a rally attendee ended up dead. Speaking in Milwaukee about having survived the attempted assassination, Donald recalled (via NBC News), "I heard a loud whizzing sound and felt something hit me really, really hard, on my right ear. ... My hand was covered with blood. Just absolutely blood all over the place. I immediately knew it was very serious, that we were under attack."

It was a shocking scene, and the third-time presidential candidate later revealed that Barron Trump turned to his mother Melania Trump after the chaos broke out. "He loves his father," Donald insisted in an interview on Fox News. "He's a good kid, good student, good athlete actually. He ran, 'Mom! What's going on? What's going on?'" Donald didn't elaborate on how Melania calmed her child, but she later released a video statement on X, formerly Twitter, about her reaction. "The attempt to end my husband's life was a horrible, distressing experience," she said. "There is definitely more to this story, and we need to uncover the truth." The video turned out to be an advertisement for her upcoming memoir.