The night before Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January, the 22-year-old conservative activist CJ Pearson threw a party in honor of the influencers who had rallied behind the Republican nominee. The following week he received an email from a journalism student at New York University. She was interested in interviewing him about his social media journey.

After some back-and-forth about her use of the term “alt-right,” all of which Pearson then posted on X, the political personality made a request: “Please stay away from Barron.”

There was no need. The student, Julia Diorio, had never seen the president’s son—as of last fall, her most famous classmate among the 30,000 or so undergraduates—around campus, though she’d grown used to inquiries about him from friends and family. Such is the towering presence of Barron Trump, an 18-year-old, 6’7” freshman at NYU’s Stern School of Business, in the young MAGA imagination.

The podcasters who have dined with Barron at Mar-a-Lago rave about his swagger and romantic eligibility; the president and his aides credit him with strategic mastery as an ambassador to young online men. On social media, where his youth soccer highlights periodically circulate, he is discussed with varying degrees of irony but nearly always in breathless terms. He does not speak publicly nor operate a public social media account, which, by all appearances, has only deepened his mystique. Any view of his true place in the Trump firmament arrives in third-party glances. Melania described him to Fox News as “very vocal” in advising his father, and Elon Musk recounted on X how he spent Thanksgiving “discussing consciousness & video games with Barron.”

Diorio and her colleagues at the Washington Square News, where she is the arts editor, have barely covered Barron’s presence on campus. Despite his outsize profile, his campus life has proven too vaporous, a notable distinction at a school that counts Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and a handful of other former child stars as alumni. “Even Dylan Sprouse was a leader at one of the dorms,” Diorio pointed out.

To get Barron to class, a motorcade of black SUVs drives him about 20 minutes from his home at Trump Tower. Tisch Hall, Stern’s undergraduate building, is a block from Washington Square Park and set off behind a barricaded plaza. In the fall, as Barron’s first semester got underway, his movements were tracked and recorded on social media for sport. “Naaa,” a junior finance major wrote on Instagram, posting an off-guard photo of him in the back of a lecture hall. “Today was wild.” The attention started to feed on itself. The conservative YouTube personality Benny Johnson, observing the campus hype, described Barron as a study in “what real rizz is.”

NYU—and its business school in particular—lacks a central social life, with classrooms and living arrangements dispersed throughout Lower Manhattan. Barron’s classmates described his day-to-day comings and goings to me as limited. One remembered asking to play basketball with him. Barron seemed interested, he said, but he got the sense that, with plainclothes Secret Service officers hovering, “he wasn’t really allowed to do stuff.”

“He’s sort of like an oddity on campus,” said Kaya Walker, the president of NYU College Republicans. “He goes to class, he goes home.”

In interviews, Trump normally likes to talk about Barron in relation to TikTok, the world of podcasting, and his son’s other of-the-moment interests. When the family was promoting a new cryptocurrency finance platform last year, Barron was touted as the company’s leading visionary. But he never showed up to the livestreamed launch event, leaving the host to lament that Barron skipped making his first-ever public remarks because “we took too long.”

The pattern is disorienting but unmistakable. Barron’s cachet grows with every missed appearance. He is too young, and too wordless, to have been tarnished by the broader resentment his father inspires. Owing to some combination of novelty and force of repetition, he has become the Trump child most readily associated with his father’s reelection, even as he also skipped the Republican National Convention in July. In a statement, his mother cited prior commitments. (A White House spokesperson declined to comment for this story.)

Barron has long made for a blank canvas, or a field of battle. Rosie O’Donnell apologized to Melania in 2016 for speculating that he was autistic, and the following year, a Saturday Night Live writer was suspended for predicting on social media that the then 10-year-old “will be this country’s first homeschool shooter.” On several occasions, Chelsea Clinton has come to his public defense.

While the likes of the Bush daughters and Ella Emhoff have also served as inevitable proxies for their parents and stepparents, in the last year or so, the fervor for Barron has taken on an uncommonly dedicated dimension. His schooling has not yet surfaced anything resembling the beer pong photograph from the Obama kids’ Sidwell Friends days, to say nothing of the Olsens’ reported nightlife exploits during their own NYU tenure. Still, there’s no shortage of effort to position him as an emblem of young American indulgence.

After TMZ reported in December that Barron’s peers knew him as a low-key video game enthusiast, a source quickly emerged to tell People that he was in fact a “ladies’ man.” According to the report, young women of all political persuasions were falling for him. The subject—not, it should be said, a strictly dichotomous one—has been widely litigated, with Eric Trump describing his half brother as the “most eligible bachelor in the world” and one of Barron’s classmates confirming to me that “he definitely is a gamer.” The Daily Mail proposed that conservative 21-year-old influencer Maria Arana, a Mexican American NYU student who grew up in Miami, could make for a suitable “future Mrs Barron Trump.”

“I just thought it was very random,” Arana told me. “But it’s not like I was against it.”

A junior studying child psychology at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, Arana has never seen Barron, although she thought she spotted his motorcade once. She described the network of influencers on campus as loosely affiliated, with some of them traveling in some of the same circles; her mainstay for nights out is Socialista, a Cuban-inspired club in SoHo.

Arana said she’s always found the campus environment hospitable toward her line of work. In recent months, she has also felt more secure in her politics as she’s watched opposition to Trump die down.

“I’ve seen a lot of people just kind of keep it more to themselves,” she said.

It is a prevailing sentiment in the months since the president’s reelection. When Trump appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience in October, the host posited that conservatism was the new punk. On the campaign trail, JD Vance read Slouching Towards Bethlehem, apparently priming for another end of an era. After Trump won, Matt Gaetz boasted at a New York Young Republican Club gala that the victory was as cultural as it was electoral.

NYU is broadly known as a solidly liberal enclave, if not at the level of Columbia, an uptown locus of activism. The plaza in front of Stern is the go-to student protest site, but only because it is the largest gathering area available on campus. The business school’s reputation has more to do with its competitiveness—the “Stern curve” is a reliable cliché—than it does any political leaning, even if the finance aspect gives it some right-of-center air. In January, NYU suspended about a dozen anti-Israel protesters, leading to the Fox News headline: “Elite university attended by Trump’s son cracks down on left-wing student agitators.”

Walker was mildly bothered by the frenzy around Barron, arguing that he deserved a more normal college experience. She recalled a joking remark from one of her professors that “he doesn’t really belong here.”

As a general matter, she understands why Barron has been so readily elevated by his peers. But even with a crop of new right-wing culture warriors beginning to emerge, the foremost celebrity in Walker’s mind has remained Lana Del Rey. She’s not sure that anyone has yet arrived as a mainstream face of the rearrangement she has been feeling at school.

“Somebody in the hair-and-makeup trailer,” Timothée Chalamet remembered. “They would play this podcast, which is how I discovered it.”

In the midst of his press tour for A Complete Unknown, the actor was explaining to Theo Von, the comedian and podcaster, how he wound up on his increasingly visible show. Von, who has described himself as feeling like a “secretary sometimes for Joe Rogan,” is one of the leading personalities in the loose media space, characterized by its free-ranging and lengthy interview style, that became a focal point of Trump’s campaign last year.

In this ecosystem, Barron is often understood as a behind-the-scenes operator as well as an aspirational figure. His coming-of-age has coincided with the rise of a corner of pop culture into which the president has slotted naturally. “He knows you very well,” Trump said during his own appearance on This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von. “He said, ‘Dad, he’s big.’”

After Von attended the January inauguration, where the president’s son received a standing ovation at a rally, he posted a parting wish on X: “I wanna meet dang Barron!!”

As Barron prepared for the day that his father would assume office once more, he worked with a tailor recommended to him by Justin Waller, a steel entrepreneur and internet personality. Waller is a friend of Andrew Tate’s—he told me that the ultra-notorious influencer encouraged him to join his online fray—and had his YouTube channels taken down for promoting one of Tate’s businesses. Just recently, Waller said, he, Barron, and Barron’s close friend Bo Loudon, a rising 18-year-old conservative voice, were in a canopy area at Mar-a-Lago, “talking about everything that’s going on here.”

“Through the glass,” Waller said, “I see Donald and Elon and [Donald Trump] Jr. walking in, so they’re 30 yards away from us while I’m sitting there talking to Barron.”

He became connected to Barron after Loudon reached out last year to tell him that his friend was a fan of his work. Waller, podcaster Patrick Bet-David, and UFC fighter Colby Covington dined with the teenage duo at Mar-a-Lago a few weeks later.

“We’re just trying to help the young men,” Waller said. “There’s a whole generation of young men that need help. A lot of single-mother households, they don’t have direction. They need somebody to tell ’em it’s okay to be strong, it’s okay to be masculine.”

Not including Barron, though. Waller described him as “the kind of guy that can start a business that can go public, but he also can sit down and drink a beer with the individual that’s running his manufacturing facility.”

Newsweek recently reported that Barron and a friend from his Palm Beach prep school, along with the cousin of a Republican congressman from Idaho, were planning to start a luxury real estate firm. One of Barron’s partners said that the company had been dissolved shortly after the election to avoid media coverage, but that it would be relaunched in the spring. In the following days, he doubled back and said it wasn’t happening at all. No further business ventures have been announced yet—Barron’s not due to graduate until 2028, when his father’s term will have nearly ended.

A couple of weeks after Trump returned to office, as the spring semester was beginning, Barron appeared at NYU in a cream sweater and black Adidas sneakers. Alongside a fresh set of paparazzi photos, the New York Post announced that “​​the big man on campus is back.”

Update: After this story was published online, Kaya Walker resigned as president of the NYU chapter of College Republicans of America, citing pressure from the national organization amid a social media outcry over perceived criticism of Barron Trump (which she denied). She later expressed regret over stepping down.