How Barron Trump's Life Compares To His Siblings When They Were 18
Barron Trump is the youngest son of Donald Trump and the only child whom Donald and Melania Trump share, but Barron has four half-siblings: Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and Tiffany Trump. Barron turned 18 on March 20, 2024, but his life looks a bit different than his siblings' lives at that age due to his father's former president status. After his father was not reelected in 2020, Barron transferred to a new school and became a student at Florida's Oxbridge Academy.
Instead of remaining in sunny Palm Beach (where they lived with their mother Ivana Trump) for high school, Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka went to boarding school up north. The brothers attended Pennsylvania's Hill School and Ivanka attended Connecticut's Choate Rosemary Hall. Tiffany, whose mother is actor Marla Maples, lived with her mother in California after Donald and Maples divorced. As a teenager, she attended Viewpoint School in Calabasas.
The Trump siblings' teenage years likely looked very different because they attended schools all over the country. However, Don Jr., Ivanka, and Tiffany all went to the same school — the University of Pennsylvania, where Donald had also gone. Eric graduated from Georgetown University, and after getting her undergraduate degree, Tiffany headed to Georgetown Law School. Barron has yet to announce a college choice as of this writing.
Barron lives a much more private life than Ivanka did at 18
A major difference between Barron Trump and his sister Ivanka Trump is how much he is in the public eye at 18. For example, a PR expert told The List that Barron will likely continue to value his privacy, much like his mother Melania Trump, in 2024. On the contrary, the year she turned 18, Ivanka had been walking runways for a while. She had a modeling career, working with designers such as Vivienne Westwood and Zang Toi.
She also had a career in print modeling. Ivanka was featured in "Sassy" magazine with her one-time friend Lysandra Ohrstrom. (Ohrstrom wrote a piece in Vanity Fair about how she and Ivanka met in seventh grade and were incredibly close friends for over 10 years but grew apart as they got older.) At 15, Ivanka was on the 1997 cover of "Seventeen" magazine. At 16, she was featured in a spread for the January 1998 issue. The photographs for that piece were taken at Choate Rosemary Hall in her dorm room and were shared by a fan on Instagram in 2019.
On the flip side, Tiffany Trump spent her teenage years out of the spotlight, which Barron has done since moving out of the White House. There are some signs that Barron is ready to step into the public eye, but he's made no indication that he would follow in Ivanka's footsteps to a modeling career.
Barron is reported to be shy, unlike his eldest brother
Another major difference between Barron Trump and his siblings is that at 18, Barron is quiet and likely more sheltered than his siblings were at that age. The opposite of shy, Donald Trump Jr. was notorious for being a party animal in college. In a New York interview, Don Jr. admitted to the wild behavior of his college days: "To be fairly candid, I used to drink a lot and party pretty hard, and it wasn't something that I was particularly good at. I mean, I was good at it, but I couldn't do it in moderation."
He and Eric Trump were also put to work by their father. Don Jr. worked at Trump Castle when he was 13. Then, Donald Trump had Don Jr. and Eric spend their summers working on his Seven Springs mansion property in New York. Eric told Forbes, "We were literally riding mowers around, we were mowing all the fields, cutting down trees and fallen trees, cutting rebar and laying marble and doing electrical work, doing demo work."
Barron seems to live a quieter, sheltered life in Palm Beach. A source for People said, "Melania's main job is taking care of Barron, and I think it's possible that she will follow him wherever he goes to school. Barron is shy and reserved, and she has been a good mother to him all of these years."