The former head of the College Republican club at New York University said she regrets stepping down over a hail of backlash for calling Barron Trump “an oddity on campus.”
NYU senior Kaya Walker told the New York Post that her remark, which was made to a Vanity Fair journalist writing about Barron, was taken wildly out of context.
“He’s sort of like an oddity on campus,” she told Vanity Fair of her 18-year old classmate. “He goes to class, he goes home.”
Rather than an insult, Walker explained she was sympathizing with Barron —who lives at his family home in Midtown Manhattan and not, like many other students, at NYU’s Greenwich Village campus—as a fellow commuter.
“[AF Post] took it to say that I was saying that Barron was strange for being a commuter—which I thought was crazy because I’m a commuter,” Walker told the Post. “They [made it] look like I was calling the president’s son weird, but I feel like anybody who can read would know that’s not what I was doing.”
Walker was put on blast for her comments last week by conservative social media accounts, including the “America First” news aggregator AF Post, triggering right-wing backlash that led to her resignation Sunday.
A day later, the national College Republican organization slammed her remark about President Donald Trump’s youngest child as “inappropriate” and invited Barron to join its ranks.“He’s sort of like an oddity on campus,” she told Vanity Fair of her 18-year old classmate. “He goes to class, he goes home.”
Walker said that she feels troubled by the amount of media attention her under-the-radar classmate has to deal with because of his famous father: “I just feel bad that he’s having this hard college experience, and I understand that he wants to be left alone.”
Barron has participated in a handful of family ventures, notably as the “DeFi Visionary” of the Trump family crypto platform World Liberty Financial, but largely avoids media attention and the high-profile surrogate work of his elder siblings.
Walker noted she doesn’t know Barron and campaigned for his father. “Why would I have any ill intent towards him?” she asked.
The Post noted that Walker also spoke to the paper in December and expressed similar sympathies for Barron and his right to privacy, including frustration at classmates who take photos of him to post in their Instagram stories.
“I feel bad for him more than anything,” she said in December. “He’s kind of watched like a zoo animal.”
Walker—who said she had been dutifully “trying to support the conservative movement” and waging the “uphill battle being a Republican at NYU”—told the Post it was a mistake to step down: “I actually regret resigning.”
While the national College Republican organization said it agreed that her remarks had been taken out of context, its president Will Donahue told the Post that chapter heads must seek board approval before giving comment to “left-wing journalists.”
He also confirmed that the national organization pressured Walker to resign.
“Left-wing organizations have a tendency to misconstrue what we say, and a college student without media training tends to be a ripe candidate for predatory journalists,” Donahue added.
