As amusing as it might be to imagine what a little place called Barron Trump’s NYU dorm room might look like—what posters does he have? Did he spring for a mini-fridge?—we’ve now learned that Barron is probably not in fact living a life that involves wearing flip-flops to the communal shower. This is according to former first lady Melania Trump, who offered a few new details about her son’s college life in a recent Fox News interview.
In a segment pegged to her upcoming memoir, Melania responded to a question from Ainsley Earhardt about what it’s like being an empty nester, now that her son, Barron, has started his freshman year at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “I could not say I’m an empty nester,” Melania replied, going on to say of Barron, “It was his decision to come here, that he wants to be in New York and study in New York and live in his home, and I respect that.” While Melania didn’t, as far as I can tell, explicitly say that Barron lives in Trump Tower instead of a dorm, that’s how People and other news outlets interpreted her words, so we will cautiously do the same.
I guess it makes sense—after all, he grew up in a home with its own ballroom. Was he really gonna go live in some crummy shoebox he has to share with a roommate? It’s probably a boon for Barron’s sleep quality, since a twin-size bed would have been rough on his extremely tall frame. Plus, it can’t be easy to be a public figure among his peers, flanked by security guards who make him stand out even further. NYU was probably not the place to go if he wanted anonymity, anyway: Wired has reported that fellow students are already busy capturing him in Sasquatch-sighting-style TikToks.
We don’t know much about his actual life at school so far: The Daily Mail has suggested that he skipped the student activities fair and some first-week parties and is generally keeping a low profile. But I also think that his choice to forgo the dorms is worth briefly lamenting, and not just because I’m a big Felicity fan and enjoy picturing Donald Trump’s son sitting in one of the show’s giant, beautifully lit dorm rooms narrating his life story into a tape recorder. (In the TV show, Felicity went to the University of New York, but that was just a fake-for-TV version of NYU.)
No, it’s worth lamenting because for anyone who’s lucky enough to attend a four-year residential college, living in the dorms is a rite of passage. And despite whatever security challenges are involved in housing a former or current first kid on campus, it’s one every college-attending first kid in recent memory experienced: Malia and Sasha Obama lived in dorms at their schools, as did the Bush twins, and Chelsea Clinton before them. Trying to go back further than Clinton proved inconclusive as to dorm-living progeny, though it did yield the tidbit that Amy Carter was kicked out of Brown University. To think, in the ’80s they’d just kick a president’s kid out of Brown for something as harmless as flunking her classes! A different time.
Anyway, back to Barron, who I suspect would have to invent a new level of flunking for NYU to ever kick him out: On the basis of him being an 18-year-old kid who didn’t choose who his parents are, he deserves some respect and privacy. He also deserves to get to decide what to do with his life. Some might argue that being a pampered scion who doesn’t really care about expanding his horizons is the NYU experience to a T, and maybe so. But if we’re being idealists here, anyone, even and especially Barron, could benefit from figuring out how to get along with a roommate, living among a diverse student body, learning to do their own laundry, spending some time away from the world in which they grew up, and all the other things that happen when you live in a college dorm. Choosing to skip out on all of this and instead hide out in a glitzy skyscraper with your name on it, if that is indeed what’s going on here, does, however, feel very on brand for the Trump family. It may look like a cruel institution to outsiders, but hey, the same could be said of the NYU housing lottery.
