"Trump’s Young Strategist: Bo Loudon, Barron's Close Companion, and His Influence on the 2024 Podcast Strategy | Vanity Fair"
It was less than a month since Donald Trump pumped his fist after an assassination attempt, and Adin Ross had an appointment at Mar-a-Lago. The 23-year-old streamer arrived for his August interview with gifts: a Tesla Cybertruck decorated with the new and bloody signature photograph of the campaign, and a $300,000 Rolex watch. A live online audience peaking at around 500,000 watched Ross’s feed as the Republican nominee mused for an hour-plus on the importance of cryptocurrency, the greatness of UFC CEO Dana White, and the unfairness of Atlanta rapper Young Thug’s racketeering case.
The conversation, in its meandering yet recognizable path, offered a sketch of the unwieldy brand of modern masculinity that has increasingly shaped the final stretch of the presidential election. In these corners, organized around a loose network of online personalities in which Ross looms large, the subject matter mixes freely—sports, music, sex, money—and rarely amounts to an explicit politics, though Trump is the clear candidate of choice. Sitting in the back of the room while Ross and Trump spoke was the sort of young man, with his hair slicked back and a thin gold chain around his neck, whom the event might be aimed at, and the one who was later credited—by his mother—with orchestrating it.
Bo Loudon is the 18-year-old son of a conservative media personality, Gina, and a former Missouri state senator, John, who are both Mar-a-Lago members. The younger Loudon, who has called Trump’s own 18-year-old son, Barron, his best friend, has garnered rising online visibility in recent months as the former president has aimed his campaign at young men and taken it to their preferred platforms.
Barron, who lacks public-facing social media accounts, has become something of a cipher to his online demographic. Loudon, positioned so closely to the former first kid, talks, and he does so often, to his quarter of a million followers. He operates in a narrow vein of influence, but one that runs all the way to the top. He has described Ross as his “good friend” and a “legendary streamer,” and he has labeled himself “Trump’s young gun.” After the Ross interview, the Loudons, the Trumps, and Ross gathered for a photo, and a few weeks later, as Bo explained his interest in politics to Gina on her Real America’s Voice show, she described the stream as “his brainchild, if I’m not mistaken.”
In the last several months, Trump has conducted an ongoing tour of the rowdy podcast-YouTube-streamer space, which has itself been a recurring focus (and source of anxiety) for the mainstream press. In August, before a particularly memorable exchange about the strength of cocaine with leading podcaster-comedian Theo Von, Trump began the interview by explaining to his host that he learned about the show through Barron. Mentioning his son’s imprimatur to these figures has become a hallmark of the appearances, and in turn, the Bo-Barron duo has attracted some attention, whether as tabloid novelty or as the Gen Z faces of MAGA.
“We did three unusual—I don’t know what you’d call them, but it’s a platform—with three people that I don’t know, but three people that Barron knows very well,” Trump told the Daily Mail last month as he tried to describe the interviews. “[He] actually calls all of them like friends of his because it’s a different generation. They don’t grow up watching television the same way as we did. They grow up looking at the internet or watching a computer, right?”
Loudon has been eagerly playing the part. (Neither he nor his mother, though, responded to interview requests for this story.) As his recognition has grown, he has posed in recent months with a seemingly haphazard assortment of athletes, actors, rappers, and conservative activists. “Tell Trump I said what’s up!” the singer Chris Brown told him at a September UFC fight at the Sphere in Las Vegas, according to a caption on Loudon’s Instagram. The milieu is amorphous and perhaps defined less by any exact affinities than by some of its prominent pacesetters: White, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson. In his daily online volleys, Loudon has declared that Trump, whom he almost exclusively describes as “Rightful President Trump,” has been “EXONERATED of visiting Epstein island,” and posted himself in merchandise reading, “Biden Loves Minors.” “🚨IN 1997,” he wrote on X in August, deploying his standard opening emoji, “RIGHTFUL PRESIDENT TRUMP DATED BIRACIAL SUPERMODEL KARA YOUNG FOR TWO YEARS!”
The post-Rogan media ecosystem of which Loudon is native often brushes against more traditional modes of celebrity. Ross was a guest at Michael Rubin’s White Party this past summer. Eight years after Von debuted his podcast, it has become a reliable promotional tour stop for athletes, comics, and musicians, and he has now hosted Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a friend of his. Two days after Trump was convicted in New York this spring of falsifying business records, he launched his TikTok account at a UFC fight, with Von and White in the background.
Mixed martial arts, specifically White’s UFC, is a reliable common denominator in the network. One member of the Nelk Boys, a group of Canadians in their 20s and early 30s with a devoted collective online following, befriended White’s son at a bar; White gave him a quarter million dollars as a gift in 2022. The group, which has also had Musk, Andrew Tate, and Carlson on its platforms, has become something of a standard-bearer for Trump’s outreach to young men.
“He’s making the right moves,” John Shahidi, CEO of Shots Podcast Network, the Justin Bieber–backed company behind the Nelk Boys’ podcast, said in an email. He had just recently shared an audience with the former president. “We talked about it quite a bit the other day on his plane,” Shahidi wrote, appending a link to a photo of the meeting.
If the podcast courtship is now widely understood as a key aspect of Trump’s media strategy—and Kamala Harris’s—it is also a venue for the 78-year-old former president’s nth rebirth in the popular imagination. In the mix of machismo and disaffection that marks so much of this online landscape, he has found another new home.
“If you’re a dude under the age of 30 and you have any hobbies whatsoever,” the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker recently told Crooked Media cofounder Jon Favreau, “every single facet of that is completely dominated by…center-right to Trumpian right.”
As Loudon explained to his mother on her show, he got into politics out of an agitation he was feeling amid COVID lockdowns and restrictions. His parents had urged against it—“This is a world full of drama,” he remembered them saying—but he found the pull too strong.
“I just realized that the way I was being kicked around, almost like in my school or anywhere I went to,” Loudon said, “this is just political injustice.” In 2017, with Trump’s presidential term just underway, the family had moved to South Florida, where Loudon’s father operates a bed and breakfast.
The Loudons have taken a twisting path to Mar-a-Lago since John’s political career lapsed toward the end of the aughts. In 2013, he and Gina appeared on the ABC reality show Wife Swap. Each episode paired two families from disparate backgrounds, in this instance, Tea Party activists and a polyamorous couple. For the first time in the show’s history, the couples didn’t make it to the roundtable segment that closed each volume of the experiment; Gina had been thrown out of her temporary house by a fed up counterpart and then quit, and John was concerned about the “dark forces” they were dealing with.
The following year, the Loudons’ then 18-year-old daughter began dating 57-year-old Scarface actor Steven Bauer. Gina addressed the relationship in the column she was writing at the time, telling readers that Lyda “has remained (and remains) pure until marriage.”
By 16 years old, in 2022, Bo Loudon was a high school baseball player making inroads with the conservative-influencer set. When presented that year with the prompt, “She’s a 10 but she voted for Biden,” he responded, “negative five.” One night this April, the Fort Lauderdale entrepreneur and podcaster Patrick Bet-David was called to have dinner with him and Barron at Mar-a-Lago.
They were joined by the MMA fighter Colby Covington and like-minded internet personality Justin Waller. Bet-David is a prominent player in these circles who has interviewed Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Suge Knight, MIA, Ice Cube, Jeffrey Epstein’s brother Mark, Mike Tyson, Tom Brady, and last week, Trump.
“You figure one side is going and getting celebrities,” he told me. “Trump is going after the younger male audience that spends their time on social media. I mean, we are going to see which one’s going to end up being a net positive that’s going to actually get up and get out there and vote.”
Bet-David saw the approach as an innovation driven by RFK Jr., whose presidential aspirations were fueled by his podcast appearances and who found a ready communion with Rogan and Von, among others. “You went to school, you had the 4.3 GPA, you went and did the charity,” he continued. “The other guy was smoking weed, fighting, partying, chasing girls, and you’re like, Wait a minute. I’m following the rules. Am I not supposed to be beating the other guy? Well, apparently not.”
Barron began college at New York University this fall, but Loudon’s plans are somewhat cloudier. Recently, he met Musk at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania. “He was very nice and told me he remembered sharing a post of mine recently,” Loudon wrote on X, “and told me to say hello to Barron for him.”
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