“Trump's Young Gun”: How Bo Loudon, Barron's best friend, is shaping the 2024 podcast offensive

It hasn't even been a month yet Donald Trump clenched his fist after an assassination attempt, and Adin Ross had an appointment at Mar-a-Lago. The 23-year-old streamer arrived at his August interview with gifts: a Tesla Cybertruck decorated with the campaign's new and bloody signature photo and a $300,000 Rolex watch. A live online audience of around 500,000 viewers watched Ross' feed as the Republican candidate pondered the importance of cryptocurrency and the greatness of the UFC CEO for more than an hour Dana White, and the injustice of the Atlanta rapper Young thugThe blackmail case.

The conversation, along its winding but recognizable path, offered a sketch of the ponderous form of modern masculinity that has increasingly characterized the final stretch of the presidential election. In these corners, organized around a loose network of online personalities in which Ross plays a large role, the topics mix freely – sports, music, sex, money – and rarely boil down to explicit politics, although Trump is the clear candidate of choice. As Ross and Trump spoke, sitting at the back of the room was the type of young man with slicked-back hair and a thin gold chain around his neck who the event might have been aimed at, and the one mentioned later – by him, his mother – with the orchestration.

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 gained increasing online visibility in recent months as the former president has targeted his campaign toward young men and broadcast them on their preferred platforms.

Barron, who lacks publicly accessible social media accounts, has become something of a cipher for his online population. Loudon, who is so close to the former first child, speaks, and does so often, to his quarter of a million followers. He operates in a narrow direction of influence, but one that reaches all the way to the top. He has described Ross as his “good friend” and “legendary streamer” and described himself as “Trump's young gun.” After the Ross interview, the Loudons, the Trumps and Ross met for a photo, and a few weeks later, when Bo explained to Gina his interest in politics on her show “Real America's Voice,” she described the stream as “his idea, if …”. I’m not wrong.”

Over the past few months, Trump has been on a steady tour of the noisy podcast YouTube streamer space, itself a consistent focus (and source of concern) of the mainstream press. This was followed in August by a particularly memorable exchange about the strength of cocaine with a leading podcaster and comedian Theo Von, Trump began the interview by telling his host that he learned about the show from Barron. Mentioning his son's imprimatur over these characters has become a hallmark of performances, and in return the Bo Barron duo have garnered some attention, whether as tabloid novelties or as MAGA's Generation Z faces.

“We did three unusual – I don't know what you would 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 them all his friends because it’s a different generation. They don't grow up watching TV in the same way we do. You grew up surfing the Internet or sitting in front of the computer, right?”

Loudon played the role eagerly. (Neither he nor his mother responded to interview requests for this story, however.) As his fame grew, he has posed in recent months with a seemingly random mix of athletes, actors, rappers and conservative activists. “Tell Trump I said what’s going on!” the singer Chris Brown told him at a UFC fight in September at the Sphere in Las Vegas, according to a caption on Loudon's Instagram. The milieu is amorphous and is perhaps defined less by exact affinities than by some of its prominent pioneers: white, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson. In his daily online messages, Loudon has declared that Trump, whom he almost exclusively refers to as the “rightful President Trump,” has been “exonerated from visiting Epstein's island,” and posted himself in a promotional article that read, “Biden loves minors.” “🚨IN 1997,” he wrote in August

The post-Rogan media ecosystem from which Loudon comes often clashes with more traditional forms of celebrity. Ross was a guest at Michael Rubin's White Party last summer. Eight years after launching his podcast, Von has become a reliable promotional tour stop for athletes, comedians 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 of falsifying business records in New York this spring, he launched his TikTok account at a UFC fight, with Von and White in the background.

Mixed martial arts, particularly White's UFC, is a reliable common denominator on the network. A member of the Nelk Boys, a group of Canadians in their 20s and early 30s with a loyal collective online following, befriended White's son at a bar; White gave him a quarter of a million dollars in 2022. The company, which Musk also belonged to, Andrew Tate, and Carlson on his platforms has become something of a frontrunner 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, says in an email. He had recently shared an audience with the former president. “We talked about this quite a bit on his plane the other day,” Shahidi wrote, attaching a link to a photo of the meeting.