First lady Melania Trump, miffed that a Food Network host questioned her son Barron’s parentage on Father’s Day, issued a statement through her spokeswoman Tuesday condemning comments about the 14-year-old.
“Sadly we continue to see inappropriate and insensitive comments about (President Donald Trump’s) son,” said Stephanie Grisham, chief of staff and spokeswoman for the first lady, in a statement to The Washington Examiner and to The Hill.
“As with every other administration, a minor child should be off-limits and allowed to grow up with no judgment or hate from strangers and the media.”
The East Wing was responding to a tweet on Sunday from John Henson, a stand-up comic and host of Food Network’s “Halloween Baking Championship,” ABC’s “Wipeout,” E!’s “Talk Soup.”
“I hope Barron gets to spend today with whoever his dad is,” Henson posted Sunday.
The first lady, 50, has proved to be a woman of few words, at least in public, but she can be relied on to speak out sharply if she thinks Barron is being attacked or mocked.
In December, she took to Twitter herself when law professor Pamela Karlan mentioned Barron’s name in a somewhat strained joke while testifying during the House impeachment hearings of the president.
“The Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility, so while the president can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron,” Karlan said before the House Judiciary Committee.
“A minor child deserves privacy and should be kept out of politics. Pamela Karlan, you should be ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering and using a child to do it,” Trump tweeted.
Karlan later apologized.
By custom, the mainstream media refrain from covering the minor children of presidential families except when they are in public with their parents.
As a result, little is known on the record about Barron’s life since he moved into the White House with his mother in June 2017, and the first lady would like to keep it that way. It is known that he attends a private school in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, that he likes soccer, and that he’s now taller than both his tall parents.
A new unauthorized biography of Trump recounts that even before the 2016 election, Melania began renegotiating her prenuptial agreement with the president to ensure that Barron would eventually share equally in the Trump estate with his four older half-siblings, an effort that proved successful, according to “The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump,” by Mary Jordan.
