‘I’ve spent way too much time thinking about this’: 130-year-old book is once again convincing people that Donald Trump is a time traveler

Occasional U.S. president Donald Trump is, to the best of anyone’s ability to determine, a finite force in the universe. “Or,” one TikTok account posits, “is he?”

Maybe, TikTok user mattyicerants states, the man who single handedly ruined Toad from Mario is more than just a blip in causality, destined to fade away like the rest of us. Maybe, like dead and dreaming Cthulhu or the McRib, he is a terrible and forever truth, fated to return.

In his video, the content creator tells folks about a pair of children’s novels published during the second half of the 19th century, titled The Adventures of Little Baron Trump and his Wonderful Dog Bulger and Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Journey. Already, some alarm bells might be going off, in the same way that they might if you found out that Queen Victoria had written a diary entry describing a lovely afternoon eating scones with Chelsea Clinton.

The name “Baron Trump” isn’t the only detail about the story that might be labeled “altogether ookie” by those possessed of eyes equal parts keen and crazy. In the books, as mattyicerants points out, the titular protagonist “has a mentor named Don who is a rich man who lives on 5th Avenue in New York City.” He claims that Don’s character has a mentor of his own named Pence, and that Don becomes president in 1900, eventually being “silenced by the speaker of the house.” There are other hot-button words and phrases that get thrown around, too – “Russia” and “mob” and “$130,000 hush money payment to an adult film star.” We made that last one up, but still.

The Donald Trump time travel conspiracy, explained. Sort of.

How much of what mattyicerants says in his video is verifiable? How much is true? Is Donald Trump traversing causality as a shotgun passenger, along for the adventures of his precocious youngest child and, apparently, a dog? The answer might surprise you, unless you think the answer is “no.” Then the answer won’t surprise you at all.

The internet – and stop us if you’ve heard this one – is basically just billions of games of telephone being played by anonymous contestants with varying levels of chemical stability. As a result, signals get crossed, stories get skimmed, and people often stop watching YouTube videos before they get to the part where the host invokes Nikola Tesla’s time machine.

Poster mattyicerants, who we’re sure has a lot of great qualities, including excellent taste in hats, goes pretty wildly off the rails as his video continues. He points out how wild it is that Baron Trump author Ingersoll Lockwood lived in New York City – the same New York City in which Nikola Tesla resided, “working on time travel and teleportation and all sorts of craziness.” He goes on point out that a relative of Donald Trump, an electrical engineer and professor named Dr. John Trump, came into possession of Tesla’s later-years research after the inventor passed away, studying bushels of documents on behalf of the FBI. A lot of this is true, and the good folks at PBS will vouch for it.

The spiral continues as the video states, “I guess it’s also a coincidence that IngersollLockwood.com is owned by John McAfee, who tweeted that he had 31 terabytes of information on the government.” Then he states that Back to the Future predicted 9/11. Then he shows an actual yarn wall conspiracy board. Then he shouts a bunch.

There’s a lot to go into here. Nikola Tesla was a cool guy with a lot of great ideas, but he spent most of his later years shouting “electricity!” at every problem like a kid circling “C” on all of the answers on a multiple choice test and hoping for the best. He tried to sell the military on the idea that an “electromagnetic bath” could make soldiers stronger and more healthy, instead of, you know. Sterile. The general consensus is that his higher aspirations, like the beam weapons and VTOL biplanes that he futzed with in the early 20th century, were neat ideas, but ultimately not feasible. 

The domain name that mattyicerants says is “owned by John McAfee” before diving into yet another conspiracy theory? It’s a GoDaddy site, registered to a group of self-professed tech investors with ideas that, from the looks of things, probably mirror mattyicerants’ own. As for mattyicerants himself, it’s difficult to know where the satire ends and the genuine tinfoil-hattery begins. He gets his facts mixed up regarding the books he’s talking about, seemingly having skimmed and half-remembered this Newsweek article on the subject from 2017. For his part, Ingersoll Lockwood didn’t appear to have any supernatural abilities re: prognostication. His wife left him for another man, which is the sort of thing that you tend to prepare for better if you can see the future.