Two works of fiction written by American political writer Ingersoll Lockwood in the 1890s have been circulating online for years as fuel for conspiracy theories suggesting that Donald Trump and his son Barron are somehow connected to events Lockwood described more than a century before they occurred.
The books are “Baron Trump’s Marvellous Underground Journey,” published in 1893, and “1900, or The Last President,” published shortly after, and both have been authenticated as genuine historical texts by fact-checking organisations including Snopes.
The first book follows a young, adventurous and bored aristocrat named Baron Trump, who lives in a place called Castle Trump and embarks on a journey to Russia where he seeks hidden underground passages to alternate dimensions.
In Russia, the fictional Baron is guided by a figure described simply as Don, referred to in the text as the master of all masters, a detail that has become a focal point of online speculation given the similarity to the name Donald.
The character shares a name that is phonetically and visually close to Barron Trump, the president’s youngest son, though the spelling differs and the resemblance is largely limited to that surface-level coincidence.
The second book, set in early November in New York City, opens with a city in a state of uproar following the election of an enormously opposed outsider candidate to the presidency, a premise that readers have mapped onto the 2016 and 2024 elections.
The novel describes police officers urging citizens to stay indoors as mobs organise under the direction of anarchists and socialists threatening to plunder the houses of the wealthy, imagery that some have compared to post-election unrest in the modern era.
One of the more specific and frequently cited coincidences is that the book mentions the Fifth Avenue Hotel as the first target of the mob against the newly elected outsider president, and the address given in the text corresponds to the location where Trump Tower now stands.
The book also features a character named Lafe Pence who serves as Secretary of Agriculture, a name that has been connected to former Vice President Mike Pence, though historical records show that a real figure named Lafayette Pence lived from 1857 to 1923 and served in Congress, likely providing the actual inspiration for the character.
The honest assessment of these books is that the parallels are a mix of genuine coincidence, common naming conventions of the era, and the human tendency to find patterns in loosely connected data points when primed to look for them.
Lockwood was a prolific political satirist who wrote extensively about wealth, power and outsider politics, making it unsurprising that a story about a chaotic election involving a wealthy New York outsider would bear some resemblance to events that occurred more than a century later.
The books are freely available through the Internet Archive and are worth reading as historical curiosities in their own right, separate from any conspiracy theory framing.
