Why These Victorian-Era Books Once Fuelled the Conspiracy of Donald Trump Being a ‘Time Traveller’

In the past few years, several novels written more than a century ago are gaining notice due to their apparent links to the Trump family, and they were discovered by a horde of internet investigators. After being released in 1889, both The Travels and Adventures of Little Baron Trump and His Wonderful Dog Bulger and its sequel, Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Adventure , were mostly forgotten. The author, attorney Ingersoll Lockwood, was most known (when he was alive) for his involvement in the financial issue that followed an old woman’s death on the train lines close to Philadelphia.

Of course, the most important fact for readers in the contemporary day is that the protagonist of his works seems to closely resemble Donald Trump , a coincidence that inexplicably caused some internet users to deduce that the books weren’t simply interesting reads but rather strong evidence that our president may be a time traveler. A Newsweek story from July 2017 pointed out some seemingly prophetic parallels, including the novel’s Russian setting, a figure by the name of Don, and a ‘Fifth Avenue Hotel’ in New York City—the location of Trump Tower today.

However, at the same time, critics have pointed out that Fifth Avenue is a well-known area of New York that has been the location of many upscale eateries, retail establishments, and hotels since the late 1800s (the Waldorf-Astoria was built there in 1893). So, this detail appears to be less of a foreshadowing of the location of the Trump Tower and more of a reflection of the time it was written.

In addition, Lockwood penned a booklet in 1896 titled The Last President , which has some intriguing contemporary connections but does not include the Baron Trump persona. The story starts in New York City, where the victory of an outsider candidate has many people alarmed. People ‘in the upper portions’ of the city sat ‘as if paralyzed with a nameless dread’ in response to the news.

Online conspiracy theorists started taking an interest in the book coincidences; some think that the Baron Trump book’s doorway to other universes validates a belief that the Trump family has been able to go back in time for a long time, thanks to the ex-president’s uncle, engineer John Trump. As reported by The New Yorker , John had access to Nikola Tesla’s documents, and according to the hypothesis, Tesla was studying time travel, so Donald’s victory in the 2016 presidential contest was ‘made possible’ by Tesla’s knowledge.

As per Politico , additional data was discovered on Reddit, where a user pointed out that the antagonist in the Super Mario Bros. film attempts to ‘take over Earth by merging their parallel dimension with ours’ and has an odd resemblance to Donald. Of all people, many argued that the antagonist from the Back to the Future film, Biff Tannen, purportedly behaves like the former President. Naturally, there were some who slammed all these hypotheses, but at the same time, others were intrigued by these myriad conspiracy theories.