Is Donald Trump Really Barron's Father? Not Everyone Is Convinced

Donald Trump and his third wife, Melania Trump, welcomed Barron Trump in March 2006, a year after tying the knot. The timeline is pretty straight-forward, but not everyone agrees. As Donald's most reclusive child, Barron has inspired interest in his personal life. But there are good reasons he stays out of the spotlight. For one, he was a child throughout his father's presidency. And his mother, who only has one child, is very protective of him.

But Melania's efforts haven't been able to keep conspiracy theories from spreading. Some are so out there that the Trumps probably have given them no thought, like the one that claims they have a time machine and that Barron is actually the character in Ingersoll Lockwood's 1893 book "Baron Trump's Marvelous Underground Journey," Newsweek noted. Others, however, are a lot more damaging and have prompted a response from the Trumps. One such theory claims Donald isn't Barron's biological father.

The belief was partly inspired by Donald himself, when he seemingly forgot Barron is his child in a 2019 press announcement at the White House to announce his and Melania's joint efforts to combat vaping. "That's how the first lady got involved. She's got a son — together — that's a beautiful young man," he said. For many pundits, Donald's blunder simply showed how uninvolved a parent he is. "He's like the world's worst dad. It's like him and Darth Vader," Trevor Noah joked on "The Daily Show." But many others took his comments a bit more literally.

Speculation regarding the identity of Barron Trump's supposed father has mostly stayed in the confines of social media and internet forums. But the conspiracy theory reached the mainstream on Father's Day in 2020, when Food Network host John Henson commented on it. "I hope Barron gets to spend today with whoever his dad is," the "Halloween Baking Championship" co-host shared in a since-deleted tweet. This time around, Melania Trump didn't stay quiet. "Sadly we continue to see inappropriate and insensitive comments about the President's son," she said in a statement via her spokesperson.

But Melania couldn't stop netizens from speculating on the identity of who they believe is Barron's supposed real father. To some, Barron is the son of Hank Siemers, a Trump Tower staffer who allegedly was involved with Melania for quite a long time. "Word is, for many years, Melania's been having an affair with the head of security at Tiffany's in the Trump Tower lobby," American author Monica Byrne wrote in a since-deleted tweet in 2017.

A former "Celebrity Apprentice" staffer even claimed Melania and Siemers were pretty serious. "Melania didn't live with him in Trump Tower either, she lived with her boyfriend," Noel Casler tweeted in 2019. But Siemers isn't the only possibility that has come up. Barron's stunning height has also somehow sparked speculation that his dad is an Eastern European basketball player. However, the growing resemblance between Barron and Donald is hard to deny.

Donald Trump's relationship with his first three children has crossed the boundaries of their personal and professional lives. His relationship with his youngest, on the other hand, is said to be colder, though Donald claims the two are close. In his 2018 book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," journalist Michael Wolff contended Donald was always far from father-of-the-year. "[He was] an absentee father for his first four children [and] was even more absent for his fifth, Barron," he wrote.

But while his relationship with his oldest children improved as they became adults, the same doesn't seem to be happening for Barron. "He doesn't get along with his son ... his son is effectively not at all a part of his life," Wolff said on "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell" in 2019 while describing how Donald's lack of interest in Barron caused issues in his marriage to Melania Trump.

Melania herself has admitted Donald isn't the most present of fathers. "My husband is traveling all the time," she told People in 2015. But she noted Barron was interested in his father when he was around. "Barron loves to be one-on-one with Dad because normally he's almost always all the time with me," she added. For his part, Donald has been open about how proud he is of Barron, particularly his height. "He's a great athlete. He's very tall," he said on "The Megyn Kelly Show" in September 2023.