Barron Trump isn’t ‘fair game’ — and neither is Tom Brady’s family
Former President Donald Trump, left, arrives with his son Barron for the funeral of the former first lady’s mother at the Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach, Fla., Thursday, Jan. 18, 2024.
“Trump Derangement Syndrome” is the term that Donald Trump supporters use to describe hatred for the former president that goes above and beyond any rational opposition to the man and his behavior and policies. It’s on full display this week in a surprising place — reaction to the news that the former president’s youngest son, Barron, will be a delegate to the GOP convention in Milwaukee, scheduled July 15-18.
As Newsweek reported, some people have said the younger Trump is “fair game” for criticism ever since he turned 18 in March, and the announcement that he would be a delegate representing Florida — along with several other members of the Trump family — was like an invitation to pile on. It was as if people had been saving up insults since 2016, just waiting for Barron to come of age.
In some of the milder posts on social media, he was called a “lanky dweeb,” an “awkward beanpole” and “a lab experiment gone wrong.” It was not only suggested, but put forth as unassailable truth, that anytime someone steps into the political arena, it’s OK to unleash the hounds of hate before they’ve done anything wrong, or even spoken in public.
And we wonder why so few people want their children to run for public office.
The question of who and what is “fair game” also played out in the recent Netflix roast of NFL superstar Tom Brady.
Roasts, of course, are brutal by definition, but as Jim Geraghty wrote for National Review, “some jokes went so far over the line that they needed to be tracked with the Hubble Space telescope,” and many of those far-traveling jokes involved Brady’s family. Former New England Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe, for example, ragged Brady about things he had experienced but Brady had not, one being a “28th wedding anniversary.”
“Too soon” doesn’t even begin to describe why this joke was reprehensible. The breakup of a 13-year marriage with young children in the home shouldn’t be a punchline, ever, and it’s been reported that Brady has apologized to his former wife, Gisele Bündche, for jokes made about her and the marriage at the roast.
Defenders of the jokes pointed out that Brady’s three children were “spared” in that they themselves weren’t the subject of jokes — as if children could be unaffected by people making fun of their parents’ marriage and the family’s collective pain over the 2022 divorce. Bündche, however, made clear that her children were affected. The adults in the room — and by “room,” I mean the country — should have known that this would be the case.
And yet, here we are. As a society, we are 0-2 in making good judgments about what is “fair game” this month, and we’re not even halfway through May.
Apologies won’t help the Brady children now — the ugly jokes will be seen on Netflix and social media for as long as the world has interest in Tom Brady. There’s still hope, however faint, that the “fair game” crowd could back away from Barron Trump.
Admittedly, we have little information about him, but he seems to be a nice young man, possessed of striking looks, admirable height (he’s said to be 6′7′’), a good education and two-parent privilege, which may or may not translate into a political career. He hasn’t shot any dogs, as far as we know. Maybe he’s the Trump the world has been waiting for, the Trump everyone can get behind. It’s too early to crown Barron his father’s successor, and it’s also too early to say he won’t be the greatest of all possible Trumps.
It’s past time, however, for us to acknowledge that politics has gone two steps beyond vicious when it sharpens knives in preparation for an 18-year-old to enter the arena. Donald Trump and Tom Brady have long competed there; if people want to take them to task (or, in Trump’s case, to court) for what they have done, they have every right.
But even Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of Bill and Hillary and the subject of similar derision as a child, has said people need to leave Barron Trump alone. As The Palm Beach Post reported last month, Clinton said on “The View” that Barron Trump is a private citizen, and “I feel so strongly that if you are a private citizen, you have an unimpeachable right to privacy, and I think the media should leave him alone.”
Note to the internet: Being a delegate to the RNC doesn’t take Barron Trump out of the realm of private citizenry. He’ll still be a private citizen in August. And no degree of celebrity excuses making a roast — online or on TV — all in the family.