His Lonely Begotten Son

So here we are, at Christianity’s holiest moment, marking the (alleged) resurrection of God’s only flesh and blood offspring. Every year it happens at the same time, right as my corner of Europe, where His brand arguably hit its greatest heights, bursts into glorious spring. I am sure they planned it that way.

Here in Saint-Maxime, the lambs are gamboling in the pastures, the Boston Ivy on the front of my house is unfurling, and everything out back is in bloom. The baby pink flowers on my two little daphne bushes pack such a fragrant punch, half of my yard smells like the bosom of a wealthy grandmother. We are having garden parties and brandishing lawnmowers again. In this limbo while our gas stations still have product, we’re good. No, we’re exuberant.

I can’t help but compare our Beatrix Potter diorama to the horror film happening in America. It feels like bizarro world, the exact opposite of where I sit. Instead of blushing life, there is pointless death: from measles outbreaks, unnecessary plane crashes, and ICE detention centers. Data centers squat the landscape like death stars, leaching carcinogens into the atmosphere, sucking up all the available energy. Rights are eroding faster than America’s crumbling infrastructure. The entire thing reeks of decay and ill health, rotting on the vine.

If life in Le Perche is a serene pastoral, America under Trump is Gothic. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the literary genre emerged as a counterweight to the rationality, rigor and piety of the prevailing times. Books in its canon—The Monk, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Grey—subvert the natural mortal coil that the science at the time was just starting to understand. While the above titles are examples of fine literature, Gothic horror was even more successful in the Penny Dreadfuls—cheap broadsheets full of fantastic tales and true crime, straight from the underbelly. The public, weary of standing so upright, lapped them up with a thrill.

Rather than fresh air and renewing life and sunshine, Gothic tales roll around in rot, putrefaction and disease, with narrative engines that run on psychological torture, wielded by unreliable, unwell storytellers peddling innuendo and fake news. Superstition trumps rationality, like preferring beef tallow and raw milk to vaccines when Cartesian science, and all its shiny progress, is just sitting right there.

Gothic antiheroes like Dorian Grey are vice signalers to rival the manosphere, flouting respectability through gleeful transgression. Clavicular, the looksmaxxing streamer who hits himself in the face with a hammer to chisel his own cheekbones, and feeds his anorexia with crystal meth and dubious peptide stacks, is at home in the Gothic funhouse of male hysterics, where earnestness is punished, and irony reigns supreme.

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With the Trump patriarch’s swirling hair and garish makeup, his dirty diaper smell and saliva-drenched elocution, he’s less the literary Dracula to me than the cinematic one, as incarnated by Gary Oldman: desiccated and painted, surrounded by a coterie of malformed, bloodthirsty sirens. The only difference in Donald’s world is, they cover their undead pallor with glowing fake tans.

While Donald is inarguably the worst of his lot, a rotten tree at the center of the family, the rest of the Mar-a-Lago Munsters are as almost as ghoulish. Don, Jr is doing his best to inherit the throne, but his insecure submission to his father is as blaring as his rumored fondness for cocaine. He is sweaty, anxious, unsteady, and not ready for prime time. The simpleton Eric is an obvious non-starter.

The only son (because come on, it has to be a son) who has a chance with the MAGA faithful is the youngest, Barron. Silent, freakishly tall, with milky skin that looks untouched by the Florida sun, he looms over the family in stony silence—Lurch in a more expensive suit.

If you think I’m kidding about MAGA and the princeling, a poll last year found that 40% of Republicans would support changing the Constitution to let Barron run for president before age 35. Nearly half supported him as a future president. The Florida GOP (you know, the one whose youth wing has a bit of a Nazi problem) offered him a delegate position in 2024. He declined.

MAGA can crank up the adoration so easily because Barron is an empty shell. This makes him especially ripe for legend. (Just ask Boo Radley how that works.) Because Melania mostly cloistered him from view, we know almost nothing about his childhood except a strange appearance at age four, when he traipsed onto a Larry King Live shoot in his daddy’s office wearing a blazer, whining in a suspiciously Slovenian accent about how much he liked “his suitcase,” a custom Louis Vuitton attaché.

If his accent betrayed how little time he spent with his father, at least his mother shopped Donald’s look. Barron has been wearing Wall Street drag ever since, even for tennis lessons and golf, Melania told ABC News. “My son is not a sweatpants child,” she said categorically.

Meanwhile, there is the story that Barron’s father’s PR machine tries to make us believe: that he’s a crypto whiz, having been listed as a “DeFi visionary” at the family’s slush fund World Liberty Financial. (Forbes estimated World Liberty’s holdings at upwards of $1.5 billion; Barron’s stake in the company is around 10%, so you do the math on his net worth.) That he founded a real estate company while he was still in high school, which he closed after the 2024 election. Right wing media tells us he has predictable taste in podcasts, which he turned his father onto. He admires the accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate and the screechy streamer Adin Ross. He was also proposed as a possible board member of TikTok once Larry Ellison et al swooped in. I’m sure we’ll learn more during the eventual investigations.

In the gap between what we know and what we imagine, if we aren’t looking to worship, we are looking for gossip. The best Barron arcana comes from social media. Bushwacking its tall grass through the years, there have been now-deleted tweets from Don, Jr.’s former girlfriend Aubrey O’Day, who said Don, Jr. told her the kid was an insufferable brat who threw food at the flight attendants on Trump’s ridiculous plane. Even better is the output of Mr. Weeks, one of my favorite Twitter follows. A former nanny who took care of one of Barron’s classmates in grade school, he has characterized the boy as a young Joffrey Baratheon.

Now that Barron is an adult, he can conceivably speak for himself. But he doesn’t, which is very out of character for a white Gen Z man. He has no social media presence. He doesn’t give interviews. He did testify in a British court recently, after witnessing, via FaceTime, the assault on a Russian woman he thought he was in a long-distance relationship with. Her boyfriend, who was eventually convicted of the assault, beat her on camera, so young Barron would understand that his lady was, in fact, already taken. The accused testified that he felt sorry for Barron, who he thought was getting rolled. During the trial, the BBC reports that the Crown Prosecution Service read the transcript of his call to the local police:

“I’m calling from the US, uh, I just got a call from a girl, you know, she’s getting beat up.”

Asked by the operator how he knew the woman, Trump said: “I don’t think these details matter, she’s getting beat up but OK fine, also I met her on social media, I don’t think that matters.”

The operator responded: “Can you stop being rude and actually answer my questions?”

This is why the #sendbarron memes that briefly drenched our feeds like an April shower were more delicious than the most peevish Iranian Legos. If there is one thing we can be absolutely sure about, it is that the fortunate son of the fortunate son will never don fatigues. And since he cannot serve in a Crombie and some hair gel, a chip off the badly aging block, he will stay at his mother’s bosom, cloistered, perhaps faking sickness or ailment if anyone asks. After all, Melania has always let the world know that Barron was her project, her priority, her only real cause. When he was 19, she told Maria Bartiromo that he still needed her “nonstop,” as if he couldn’t withstand a draft of cold air. I can practically see him tapping forlornly at his window, staring outside blankly as Palm Beach goes by, the world’s largest Gashlycrumb Tiny.