Amanda Marcotte’s new piece in Salon claims to analyze a cultural obsession with Barron Trump. What it actually reveals is what happens when commentary gets bored with reality and decides to invent something easier to talk about.

It’s Monday. The weekend outrage has already been spent. The usual villains have been dragged. The trending topics have cooled. And when outrage is your business model, you still have to file copy.

I am Barron Trump at social events 😆 pic.twitter.com/2ZWZj8lZFB

— Jonny D. (@Revolution_Eyez) January 2, 2026

So what do you do when nothing especially dramatic is happening or has been played out over and over elsewhere?

You invent something. Amanda’s specialty.

That is what Marcotte’s piece about Barron Trump feels like: a brainstorm that accidentally made it to publication. Not an analysis of a real cultural phenomenon, but a piece of political fanfiction written to fill a content hole.

Marcotte claims MAGA is “weirdly thirsty” for Barron Trump and desperate to turn him this teenager into a sex symbol, a prince, a celebrity heir. But the problem with this claim is simple. It exists almost entirely in Mandy’s imagination.

She assigns motivations she cannot possibly know. Little Mizz Salon builds a narrative out of vibes, speculation, and symbolic meaning. She treats silence like a clue and height like a personality trait. Amanda is into world-building.

If you have to invent motives, desires, and cultural movements to make your argument work, you are no longer analyzing reality. You are writing fiction. At that point, you might consider switching genres. This kind of storytelling would be more at home in a fantasy romance novel than in a political column. At least then, readers would know what they are getting.

And that brings us to the most ironic part of the piece: Marcotte accuses others of obsession while writing an essay-length meditation on a teenager who barely speaks in public.

She dissects his height. His quietness, his supposed mystique. She parses social media jokes and speculative commentary, then stitches them together into a sweeping story about what MAGA wants.

If MAGA were truly obsessed, she could have pointed to mass rallies, campaigns, fan clubs, merch, or actual organized behavior. Instead, she cites jokes, offhand remarks, and vague online chatter. Then she inflates it into a movement.

Marcotte’s piece reads less like cultural criticism and more like someone trying to reverse-engineer a controversy. It’s what happens when you need a viral take more than you need a factual one.

And then there is the Camelot comparison. You can practically hear my heavy sigh and see my eyeroll now.

Mandy insists conservatives want a Kennedy-style dynasty, full of glamour, celebrity, and romantic mythology. This is a projection, not an observation.

The Kennedy legacy is not one of honor. It is one of corruption, scandal, media protection, recklessness, and myth-making. It is a family whose worst behavior was romanticized because they were charming, connected, and photogenic.

If that is glamour, most conservatives will pass.

Marcotte assumes that everyone values fame, coolness, and celebrity power because she does. She writes as if political legitimacy flows from charisma and cultural status. But many conservatives care about things far less cinematic: competence, stability, privacy, and results.

We don’t want princes, nor do we want a Camelot. Certainly, we do not want dynasties wrapped in magazine covers.

This mismatch is the core problem with her piece. She is not describing conservatives, she’s describing herself.

Her worldview treats people as characters. Every figure must become a symbol. Silence must mean something, and people must perform a role in her story.

Barron Trump refuses to play along. He’s 19-years old, a college student. But Mandy can’t help herself.

Marcotte doesn’t know who Barron Trump is. No one outside his personal circle does. So she invents him.

She gives him a role, cultural weight. And she gives him a symbolic meaning. Mandy turns him into a character in her own story.

Then she critiques the character she created. It’s narrative cosplay.

A lot of what Marcotte treats as evidence of some dark cultural fixation is just people joking. The memes about Barron marrying a Danish princess. The comments about his height. The exaggerated, obviously unserious posts. This is how the internet works. People riff. They exaggerate. They amuse themselves.

Not everything is a pathology.

But Marcotte reads humor as intent and jokes as ideology. She flattens irony, strips away playfulness, and then builds an entire thesis on what was never meant to be taken seriously in the first place. That is not cultural insight. That is a failure to understand tone.

When you cannot recognize humor, everything starts to look like a threat. And when you cannot tell the difference between a joke and a movement, you end up writing long, dramatic essays about things that were never that deep.

This is just a writer who mistook the internet for a manifesto.

Amanda opened her laptop and decided to participate in a creative writing exercise today. When nothing in the real world fits the narrative you want, you make one up and pretend you discovered it.

Feature Image: BDEngler, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons/edited in Canva Pro