Well, We Have Barron Trump's First College Scandal

Yahoo

22-02-2025

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Barron Trump recently started his second semester at New York University, but if you're wondering how it's been going for him, too bad—we continue to know precious little about the college life of Trump's youngest, and tallest, kid. The strange thing is that despite the information vacuum with Barron, he still managed to cause a minor scandal with his campus's College Republicans group in recent days, a scandal that has then, even more mystifyingly, been widely covered in the media, earning articles in People, the New York Times, USA Today, and more. Though the competition for this week's stupidest news event will no doubt be fierce, I'd venture to say we've got a contender in this nonstory about Barron Trump leading to the forced resignation of the president of the NYU Republicans.
This all started last week, when NYU senior Kaya Walker was quoted in a write-around Vanity Fair piece about Barron Trump, his life at NYU, and the fascination surrounding him, particularly among his fellow members of Generation Z. Walker, who was identified as the head of her school's chapter of the College Republicans, told the magazine, 'He's sort of like an oddity on campus. He goes to class, he goes home.' This seems anodyne enough, so much so that you might question whether it's a sentiment worth quoting at all—'sort of like an oddity'? Not exactly trenchant commentary! Honestly, I have more questions about Walker citing Lana Del Rey as the most exciting celebrity in right-wing culture in the same article. But apparently the 'oddity' quote was enough to get her in trouble with the College Republicans bigwigs, who pressured Walker to resign and said in a press release that her statement 'does not align with the values and principles upheld by our organization.' (In their statement condemning Walker's comments, the College Republicans of America also took it upon themselves to extend an official invitation to Barron Trump 'to join us in reshaping the Republican Party.' Good luck with that!)
In her resignation letter, which the NYU College Republicans shared on X, Walker apologized but said that her comments were 'ridiculously misconstrued.' In a later interview with the New York Post, Walker elaborated, blaming the conservative X account AF Post, which shared the story, for taking her comments out of context. AF Post 'took it to say that I was saying that Barron was strange for being a commuter—which I thought was crazy because I'm a commuter,' Walker told the Post. The tweet was viewed millions of times and sparked many outraged-on-Barron's-behalf reactions. 'They [made it] look like I was calling the president's son weird, but I feel like anybody who can read would know that's not what I was doing,' she went on. I mean, since when is seeing a world-famous 6-foot-7 teenager flanked by Secret Service agents on a college campus not an oddity? Did they want her to lie and say that Barron doesn't stand out, that actually no one notices him? Trick question: What anyone who got remotely caught up in a tizzy about this on social media obviously wants is for Walker never to have spoken to the evil media at all, never mind that speaking to the media, though it's usually the campus paper and not Vanity Fair, is often part of the job description for these sorts of roles in college organizations.
While it's hard to feel too bad that a college student has been forced to step down from an extracurricular activity—she'll be fine—it's pretty ridiculous that anyone is being punished for this. Just so we're clear, the conservative movement's stance is that if your wildly racist tweets surface, you deserve another chance to do important government work, but if you acknowledge the existence of Barron Trump on the record in your capacity as a leader of a relevant group at his college, that's out of line. Walker seemed very dedicated to the group, and the cause, and while this certainly seems like one of the milder examples of casualties of the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party, it's an example nonetheless.
Meanwhile, we're left still knowing nothing, maybe less than nothing, about Barron Trump, whose legend has only grown.