“Trump’s Young Gun”: How Bo Loudon, Barron’s Best Friend, Is Shaping the 2024 Podcast Offensive
Less than a month since Donald Trump raised his fist after an assassination attempt, and Adin Ross had a date at Mar-a-Lago. The 23-year-old streamer showed up for his August interview with gifts: a Tesla Cybertruck emblazoned with the campaign’s gory new signature photo and a $300,000 Rolex watch. A peak live online audience of about 500,000 people watched Ross’s feed as the Republican candidate mused for more than an hour on the importance of cryptocurrency, the greatness of the UFC CEO White Dana, and the Atlanta rapper’s injustice young thugscam of.
The conversation, along its winding but recognizable path, offered a sketch of the unwieldy brand of modern masculinity that is increasingly shaping the final stretch of the presidential election. In these corners, organized around a loose network of online personalities in which Ross appears widely, topics mix freely—sports, music, sex, money silver—and rarely explicitly political, even though Trump is the obvious candidate of choice. Sitting in the back of the room while Ross and Trump talked was a young man, with slicked back hair and a thin gold chain around his neck, who the event was likely aimed at, and who was later recorded accepted—by his mother—for staging it.
Bo Loudon is the 18-year-old son of a conservative media personality, Gina, and former Missouri state senator, John, are all members of Mar-a-Lago. The younger Loudon, who called Trump’s 18-year-old son, Barron, his best friendhas garnered increased online visibility in recent months as the former president aimed his campaign at young men and took it to their preferred platforms.
Barron, who lacks a public social media account, has become something of a cipher to his online demographic. Loudon, in close proximity to his former firstborn, talks, and he does so regularly with his quarter of a million followers. He operates in a narrow sphere of influence but has a sphere of influence all the way to the top. He described Ross as his “good friend” and one “legendary streamer,” and he labeled it himself “Trump’s Young Gun.” After the interview with Ross, the Loudons, Trumps, and Ross gathered for a photo, and a few weeks later, when Bo explain his interest in Gina’s politics towards her The voice of real America show, she described the broadcast as “his brainchild, if I’m not mistaken.”
Over the past few months, Trump has been on a steady tour of the podcast-YouTube-streamer buzz, which itself is a periodic concentrate (and source of anxiety) for mainstream press. In August, before a particularly memorable event exchange about the power of cocaine with a top comedian-podcast According to Von, Trump began the interview by explaining to the host that he learned about the show through Barron. Mentioning his son’s image in front of these characters became a hallmark of his appearances, and in turn, the Bo-Barron duo attracted some attention, albeit in the press. new cabbage or like Face of generation Z by MAGA.
“We did three unusual things — I don’t know what you call them, but it’s a platform — with three people that I don’t know, but three people that Barron knows very well,” Trump said. speak female Daily mail months ago when he tried to describe the interviews. “[He] actually calls them all his friends because it’s a different generation. They didn’t grow up watching TV the same way we did. They grow up looking at the Internet or looking at computers, right?”
Loudon was eager to play the role. (Neither he nor his mother responded to interview requests for this story, however.) As his recognition has grown, in recent months he has posed with a The array of athletes, actors, rappers and conservative activists seems haphazard. “Tell Trump what I said was wrong!” singer Chris Brown told him at a September UFC fight at the Sphere in Las Vegas, according to one caption on Loudon’s Instagram. The environment is amorphous and perhaps less defined by any precise relationship than by some of its prominent pacemakers: White, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson. In his daily online speeches, Loudon has declare that Trump, whom he describes almost exclusively as “legitimate President Trump,” “MISSED visiting Epstein Island,” and posted himself in the commodity reading, “Biden Loves Minors.” “🚨IN 1997,” he said wrote on
The post-Rogan media ecosystem that Loudon is home to often resists more traditional means of fame. Ross was a guest at Michael RubinWhite Party’s last summer. Eight years after Von launched his podcast, it has become a trusted promotional stop for athletes, comics and musicians, and now he’s 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 within the network. A member of the Nelk Boys, a group of Canadians in their 20s and early 30s with a devoted online following, befriended White’s son at a bar; White gave him one a quarter of a million dollars as a gift in 2022. The group also includes Musk, Andrew Tate, and Carlson on its platforms, has become a touchstone for Trump’s youth outreach.
“He is taking the right steps” John Shahidi, CEO of Shots Podcast Network, Justin Bieber– the backed company behind the Nelk Boys podcast, said in an email. He recently had an audience with the former president. “We talked about it quite a bit the other day on his website. plane,” Shahidi wrote, including a link to a photo of the meeting.
