Would it make you feel better, somehow, about this administration if you knew that a Victorian children’s book author named Ingersoll Lockwood might have predicted this outcome—because maybe, just maybe, Donald Trump is a time traveler?
As Politico reports, a clutch of internet sleuths discovered Lockwood’s work over the summer and found many curious similarities between Wilhelm Heinrich Sebastian Von Troomp—otherwise known as Baron Trump—and the actual Trump sitting in the White House, wreaking havoc. Lockwood published two books—The Travels and Adventures of Little Baron Trump and His Wonderful Dog Bulger and its followup, Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Adventure—both of which weren’t that popular in their time and faded into obscurity. The books tell the tale of Baron Trump and his dog Bulger, traveling the world, visiting new lands and generally making a mess of things in the process.
Fictional Baron Trump lives in Castle Trump and has a brain that is so large that his head swells to accomodate it. He is a buffoon who excels at the art of the personal insult and prefers to eat comfort food over trying new things. Despite any similarities to the actual President, the plot lines of these wacky books sound pretty entertaining. Consider the following:
One of the first places he visits in Travels and Adventures is the land of the toothless and nearly weightless Wind Eaters, who inflate to beach-ball size after a meal. They are generous hosts until Trump starts a fire. The intrigued Wind Eaters draw near, and promptly explode after the air they have ingested expands thanks to the flames. As Captain Go-Whizz, “a sort of leader among them,” chases the murderer, the dog Bulger bites one of the Wind Eaters until he deflates like a punctured balloon. The pair eventually escape, leaving the briefly betrothed Princess Pouf-fah without a mate, and Chief Ztwish-Ztwish and Queen Phew-yoo with many a funeral to plan.
Riveting! What if all this was real? Would Donald Trump be more acceptable if he had a dog named Bulger? Would everyone be happier if Wind Eaters existed and shit like this went down? Maybe. But as it stands, Baron Trump is a weird, closed-off nightmare of a man who terrorizes made-up countries and people, and would’ve faded to obscurity had the internet not dredged him up from the archives and made a case for him possibly being a time traveler.
“There’s a very distinct chance,” one YouTube vlogger explained before unfurling his theory this summer, “that I am losing my goddamn mind right now. This cannot be real.” What if, he wondered, Nicola Tesla had shared time travel research with Trump’s MIT-grad uncle, setting off a chain of events that led to both the 2016 election and the publication of these books? “Although the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming, I still believe this is complete horseshit.” one commenter noted. Nevertheless, the video has more than 46,000 views.
While I suppose this is “fun” to speculate—if you think that shadowy YouTube conspiracy videos or the show Ancient Aliens on the History Channel are productive ways to kill an evening—I would like to make it exceedingly clear that the president in the White House is (probably) not a time traveler. Sorry—he’s real.