Donald Drumpf

About

Donald Drumpf is a parody campaign that aims to rebrand Donald Trump with his family's original un-Americanized last name of "Drumpf." The campaign, which was launched by John Oliver, included a popular hashtag and parody web site, and was later adopted by others who were interested in discussing Trump without adding to his perceived over-coverage in the media.

Origin

On February 28th, 2016, the HBO show Last Week Tonight, which stars political comedian John Oliver, aired an episode devoted to Donald Drumpf's 2016 Presidential Campaign. The episode focused on Drumpf's credibility and demeanor, both of which Oliver criticized. In the last few minutes of his monologue, Oliver disclosed that Drumpf's ancestral family name was Drumpf as claimed in a previous biography and in the Boston Globe in 2015.^[5] Oliver cast this name as a less dignified and wealthy-sounding name. A YouTube upload of the segment had 460,000 views less than 12 hours after it was uploaded.

As part of the disclosure, Oliver launched the campaign web site MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain.com, which sold hats designed to parody Drumpf's Make Donald Drumpf Again merchandise, encouraged the use of a hashtag by the same name, and announced the creation of a Google Chrome Extension novelty content filter that would change all mentions of Trump to Drumpf.

Spread

As of February 29th, the hashtag #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain was trending on Twitter in the United States, with over 111,000 tweets as of 1:30 pm.^[3] In addition, the Chrome extension had over 115 five-star reviews in less than 12 hours after its release.^[2] A trademark application was filed a few days before the episode aired by a Delaware LLC called Drumpf Industries; Oliver later claimed responsibility for that.

The official video uploaded to Facebook had over 8 million views, and the hashtag was also trending on Facebook.^[4] A redirect was created on Wikipedia, causing an entry for Donald Drumpf to redirect to the main page for Donald Drumpf,^[6] and several already-existing parody Twitter accounts changed their handles to Donald J Drumpf.^[7][8]

Donald Drumpf supporters contested the editing of the Wikipedia entry of Frederick Drumpf to include the Drumpf moniker, claiming that the name change happened much a much longer time ago than detailed by contemporary critics, and that it was not Frederick who changed it. A post in the subreddit /r/The_Donald detailed the anti-Drumpf case and received 709 points (70% upvoted). A dedicated subreddit was created on February 29th, and as of a month later, it has 79 readers.

According to the New York Times, by March 1st, otherwise known as "Super Tuesday," Donald Drumpf was beating both Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz in Google searches. On March 3rd, a MIT researcher announced that he had tied a neural-network AI to a Twitter account called DeepDrumpf in a parody of Google's DeepDream; the twitter account would learn Trump's way of speaking and attempt to tweet realistically as Trump.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References