The current president has a number of children by a number of wives. His youngest child, Barron Trump, is his son with Melania Knavs. He’s 10, an actual child child. He was recently the best thing on Inauguration Day, when he played peekaboo with a smaller child, his half-sister Ivanka’s baby.
A few people have been saying mean or intrusive things about him, and then apologizing.
The first example I heard of was a 7-minute Youtube video, “Stop the Bullying,” alleging he was autistic, framed as someone defending him against charges that he had shown bad manners. This seemed phony in a way I remembered from school days. You know: “You shouldn’t pick on her! She can’t help it if she’s STUPID, poor thing.”
Melania Trump threatened to sue. The video was taken down. Its creator, James Hunter, issued a groveling apology:
In the video, I suggested Barron Trump might suffer from autism. That is in fact 100 percent false. It was incredibly irresponsible of me to diagnose Barron Trump using a selection of misleading videos. Many of the videos I used showed Barron Trump behaving like any normal kid would at 3 a.m. I falsely correlated him trying to stay aware and occasionally doing quirky things, with him suffering from autism. This was incredibly foolish of me.
My video was originally intended as an anti-bullying video, as I myself suffer from autism and wanted to educate people. Unfortunately, I completely misdiagnosed a person and ended up making a video that was false, defamatory and malicious. I retract every single statement I made in that horrendous video, and want to sincerely apologize to the Trump family, especially to Melania and Barron Trump.
A younger Barron, with his mother and some clown.
It’s a good apology. He’s right that he shouldn’t have made and released the video. The apology would seem more sincere if it didn’t read so much like Trump lawyers wrote it. “False, defamatory, and malicious” sounds like legal terminology. He explains that he did out of foolishness, not the same thing as malice. And he’s never met the kid. He doesn’t know if he’s autistic or if that’s “100 percent false.” (I personally think peekaboo is the best defense.)
What next? On Friday, an SNL writer, Katie Rich, tweeted “Barron will be this country’s first homeschool shooter.” There was an outrage explosion. A savage post appeared in my Facebook feed calling people who attack Barron “disgusting excuses for human beings,” saying, “He is OFF LIMITS to trash!!!” and “We’ve got your back little man!” Trump supporters tried to use this to demonize the non-Trump supporter part of the electorate, but I don’t think anybody supported that tweet. Especially because it wasn’t… funny.
It’s hard to keep a low profile with friends like these.
One person who came to Barron’s defense was Chelsea Clinton. She’s been a White House child who was attacked. (As have Malia and Sasha Obama.) Chelsea posted on Facebook, “Barron Trump deserves the chance every child does-to be a kid”
Rich (who was suspended by SNL) deleted the tweet and apologized:
I sincerely apologize for the insensitive tweet. I deeply regret my actions & offensive words. It was inexcusable & I’m so sorry.
Once again we see an apology that gives no clue about what’s being apologized for. It IS POSSIBLE to apologize for an insult without repeating the insult. She could say it was an “insensitive tweet about a child” without repeating it. “Insensitive” isn’t a good word, as it might imply that she merely shouldn’t have drawn attention to the child’s murderous tendencies. But “offensive” and “inexcusable” are better.
Does the ordinary rule that you should apologize to the person you hurt apply here? She wouldn’t have to track the kid down – he has his own Twitter account.
And a Facebook page.
Which raises the question of whether he really is off limits. His Facebook page is all political content. Some retweeted, some apparently “original.” I suspect it’s not really his account, that it’s run by some of his father’s employees, but I don’t know that for sure. Maybe it really was Barron who posted that Madonna should be LOCKED UP.
But the wording of the post about this latest incident – “BOYCOTT SNL! Trump Will Make Them Regret The SCUMMY Thing They Said About His Son!” sounds like it was written by someone else. Ahem: “His Son”?
Likewise, “Video Of Baron Trump With His Baby Nephew Has Just Broken The Internet” is not only in the third person, it gets his name wrong. I’m sure he can spell his own name.
If he really posted “No matter how much you whine like a little girl, Donald Trump is STILL your president! SHARE if you agree!” then someone should talk to him about respect for women. (Who? Um. How about his mother?)
Did he really come up with “BREAKING: Protestors being paid $2,500 to protest Trump’s Inauguration! [PROOF]”? Or the one calling John Lewis a “BITTER OLD RACIST”?
Maybe. Maybe he really is fascinated by “Bikers for Tump.”
But if he really is posting that stuff – the fake news, the insults, the photoshopped images of Obama on a toilet – then he’s engaging. Does “hands off” still apply? That they’re letting him do it is evidence of bad parenting.
Mudslinging is for grownups?
If he’s not posting that stuff, as I suspect, and some of his father’s hired meanies are running the thing, then they should stop. Putting someone else’s name to your own words? Forgery. And they’re making the kid look bad.
As Snarly says, “Past presidents were all about keeping their kids out of the public eye, being ‘normal,’ etc…. If he’s being used as a pawn by his dad or his dad’s ‘best people, the best people,’ what are the rules?”
Is he in or out? (He’s 10. He should be out.)
How should we think about a 10-year-old throwing mud from the top of a wall? Ordinarily, we would HAVE A TALK WITH HIS PARENTS.
That’s not going to work here. But it’s still not okay to issue public diagnoses or predict a mass-murdering future.
(Note: Barron Trump’s by-far-biggest Facebook Page “isn’t available right now.” Hmm. In fact, now there are only two pages, instead of three. Well done… Melania?)
Just so.
I thought FB had a policy of only 13 and above? So if it is his page he shouldn’t have one.
He has/had 3, two as “public figure” one as “community organization,” which is/was the one with all the political content.
Hunter’s apology is kind of a problem in and of itself. “Suffering” from autism? I guess some autistic people say that, but usually not. Hardly any disabled people approve of “suffering” terminology, for reasons that should be obvious. Further, “behaving like any normal kid” is kind of … yucky. You know, normal, because being autistic isn’t. No, he’s 100% non-autistic, perfectly normal. The guy’s bending over backwards so hard to take it back, he’s throwing autistic people under the bus. Did Lawyers write it? Perhaps you’re right there. If he’s really “suffering from” autism, this does not seem like a letter he’d write. I expect by now he’s gotten grief for it.
I think you must be right.
Here’s a comment from reader Erica:
I look at Hunter’s comment in two ways: 1. he is a jerk; or 2. he is
in fact someone on the autism spectrum, who suffers from social
anxiety or something akin, and was caught out. In my limited
experience of interviewing persons on the autism spectrum, I was
bowled over by the articulateness of one young man. His vocabulary
itself was astounding – and, also, his readiness to self-diagnose (the
interview was about a medical/psychiatric subject). He also
characterised people he knew, and family members, in medical terms –
whether this was appropriate or not, is another matter. I’m inclined
to give Hunter the benefit of the doubt: words describing feelings,
even the verb ‘to suffer’ can evidently be tricky for those who have
difficulty identifying their own feelings by name. If he were
attempting to backpedal his remarks because he was a bit scared by the
response he’d gotten, I can see he might have overdone it. He may well
also know that ‘autism’ remains in the latest DSM (2013) as a
bona-fide pathology. Asperger’s, as a ‘separate’ disorder, has been
lumped in with the definition of ‘autism spectrum’ disorders.