Donald Trump has a friend named Jim, “a very, very substantial guy.” We don’t know much else about Jim, except that, as Trump recently told a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “he loves the City of Lights, he loves Paris. For years, every year during the summer, he would go to Paris. It was automatic with his wife and his family. Hadn’t seen him in a while. And I said, ‘Jim, let me ask you a question: How’s Paris doing?’ ‘Paris? I don’t go there anymore. Paris is no longer Paris.’ ”

Trump can remind you of Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennet. For all his talk of fake news, he seems to get a decent amount of information over whatever the Fifth Avenue equivalent is of the garden fence. A man of few intimates, he often cites acquaintances: his “many fabulous friends who happen to be gay” (he went on to say that he opposed both same-sex marriage and long putters, because he’s a traditionalist); “the very famous German golfer Bernhard Langer,” who he said told him he’d witnessed voter fraud at his local polling station. (Langer’s daughter told the Times, “He is not a friend of President Trump’s, and I don’t know why he would talk about him.”) And so, in an attempt to suss out the source of inspiration for Trump’s latest foray into European diplomacy, a search was undertaken for his formerly Francophilic friend Jim.

Trump doesn’t follow any Jims on Twitter. But it’s easy to find Jims with whom he’s crossed paths. Jim Kelly, formerly of the Buffalo Bills? “No, that would not be Jim Kelly,” a representative said. Jim Dolan, the C.E.O. of Cablevision and the chairman of Madison Square Garden, who lent Trump the Rockettes for his inaugural concert? “That’s not him,” his spokesperson responded. Jim Furyk, the golfer? “Not him,” according to his agent. Jim Davis, the footwear mogul, whose support for Trump prompted a hate Web site to declare New Balance “the Official Shoes of White People”? “No, it is not Jim Davis,” a company P.R. manager replied. Jim Inhofe, the senator and climate-change denier, did not respond; neither did Jim McNerney, the former Boeing executive, who is part of the President’s Kitchen Cabinet. Jim Mattis, the “Warrior Monk” general, doesn’t have a wife. James Comey—does anybody know if he goes by Jim?

Jim, from Trump’s description, sounds old, settled, rich. His Paris, one imagines, spanned from Cartier to L’Ami Louis. But he didn’t ring a bell for observers of the New York–Palm Beach power scene. “I haven’t got a clue as to who Trump’s friend Jim is,” David Patrick Columbia, of New York Social Diary, said. “I know a few Juleses but no Jims who fit the bill,” the writer William Norwich said, confessing that he’d been puzzling over Jim’s identity ever since Trump name-checked him. “You really think there is an actual person?” the journalist Kati Marton asked. “Jim is akin to Mexican rapists and Swedish terrorists.”

The Web site of the party photographer Patrick McMullan yielded only two Trump-adjacent Jims: Jim Gold, who has posed next to Melania at charity events and, as the C.E.O. of Neiman Marcus, presumably can’t get away with shunning Paris; and Jim McGreevey, who attended an after-party for the première of a movie called “Ira & Abby” at the Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica with Trump in 2006, after a sex scandal forced him to resign as governor of New Jersey. “I only wish!” McGreevey, who now runs a reëntry program for prisoners in Jersey City, wrote. “The last time I was in Paris was eight years ago, with my then seven-year-old daughter. Vive la France, Jim.”

A promising lead: Jim O’Neill, a managing director at Peter Thiel’s investment fund, whom Trump is said to be considering to run the F.D.A. O’Neill did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment, nor did the White House. Or was Jim the same Jim who’s been in Trump’s life since before “The Art of the Deal,” in which he wrote of a college classmate, “a guy with a 180 IQ,” who “couldn’t have sex with his wife” because he was so stressed out about buying a house? (“The only famous person I knew of at Penn was Candice Bergen,” said Jim Ellowitch, Wharton ’68, who didn’t remember any other Jims.)

In a strange Trumpian inversion, Jim the Francophobe was turning out to be the jet-setting counterpart to those vague characters (like Joe the Plumber) with whom politicians have so long stocked their narratives of economic stagnation. Last week, François Hollande, the French President, criticized Trump for his comments, offering to send him or Jim a ticket to Disneyland Paris. Regular Parisians, though, just wanted to know what had happened to ruin Jim’s last trip—whether it was the rain or the new spa at the Ritz or something else. Jim, if you’re out there, levez-vous, s’il vous plaît. ♦