John Cleese: What part of Germany are the Trumps from and why did they change their name?

[Dennis Donovan]

Link to tweet

John Cleese
I see the MAGA people are keen to discuss where Kamala Harris was born

I'd be curious to know what part of Germany the Trumps come from, and why they thought it necessary to change their family name?

Really...who were they running from?

[Xavier Breath]

1. Don't get Basil started on the Germans.

[peppertree]

17. And don't mention the war!

The Drumpfs have a tradition of always avoiding and evading service in them.

A lot like their taxes.

[IrishAfricanAmerican]

19. 🤣

[Ishoutandscream2]

25. Brilliant

No matter how many times I see it; I laugh hysterically.

[TheBlackAdder]

73. Drumpf family originated from Knochensporn in the German state of Huhnerkacke (u mit umlaut)

[peppertree]

94. From the Schweinhund district, I take it.

[thomski64]

2. ..Grossvater Drumpf left das Heimat..

...to avoid military service, a family tradition...the whorehouse he opened may have been an innovation...

[rubbersole]

12. Was Jeffrey Epstine's mommy the madame?

[BoRaGard]

3. They had to change names? What are they hiding?

Do they have birth certificates and shit like that?

[thomski64]

4. ..they considered Schtupf.

..but that's more Yiddish sounding both Rump and Dump were suggested, they settled on trump, as a nod to card games like wist and bridge. In those games the Deuce of Trump can capture a trick that otherwise would have gone to a more qualified (Ace or King) in another suit.. so DonOld, a bottom dweller can "win"....

[rubbersole]

13. It takes 10-15 flushes to get that birth certificate down.

[IronLionZion]

91. They switched from Drumpf to Trump and told everyone they were Swedish

after WW2, they were ashamed to be German.

[Wednesdays]

5. "Really...who were they running from?"

They're running from the Kaiser. The Drumpf patriarch fled Germany to avoid military conscription in the late 1800's.

[ancianita]

10. Exactly. And for that a royal decree was issued banning him from the country.

Can't find when they changed their name, though. Probably in NY, to cut any connection to their draft dodger past.

[Lonestarblue]

28. I remember reading somewhere that it was after one of the world wars to make their name sound less German.

[ancianita]

29. Totally plausible.

[Wednesdays]

31. The British monarchy did that

They were the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (Prince Albert came from Germany), then renamed to House of Windsor during World War I.

[Tanuki]

72. And the Mountbattens changed their name from Battenberg.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountbatten_family

[SCantiGOP]

33. Many non-English immigrants changed their names

Practically all Irish immigrants had an O’ before their name, but dropped it when they arrived in the US.
I think anyone would have changed a name like Drumpf.

[FakeNoose]

48. This is true, but sometimes it happened unintentionally

There are many documented stories of immigrants whose names were changed for them. It happened when someone couldn't speak English or make themselves understood to the immigration officials. The immigration agents at Ellis Island would sometimes change the difficult to spell/understand last name to something that was "americanized" and without even asking.

I think it happened more often to those from Germany and Eastern Europe than to the Irish. At least the Irish understood and spoke English, even if they weren't able to read and write.

[niyad]

75. The unintentional name change reminds me of the VERY old Ole Oleson-

Sam Ting joke.

[cab67]

66. I would guess it was the First World War.

There tended to be more of that sort of thing in 1917.

[LaMouffette]

41. I guess the "bone spurs" excuse didn't work back then??? If only Dotard 45 had fled the US to avoid Vietnam instead

of having his daddy get his "bone spurs" excuse note from a paid-off doctor—and stayed gone!

[rustysgurl]

77. My grandfather did the same

when his family hid him from the Kaiser's soldiers who were going from village to village. You either agreed to serve or you were shot. So he took his older brother's birth certificate (who died in infancy) and fled with $15 in his pocket, landed in Canada and came over the border to settle in the Kansas City area. Not everyone who fled the Kaiser was branded a traitor (thank goodness). My grandfather went back to Germany to visit his family several times.

[keithbvadu2]

6. The Trumps falsely claimed their family Was Swedish when it was inconvenient to be German.

[SocialDemocrat61]

7. To be fair, during WWII Trump's uncle died in a German POW camp

Fell out of a guard tower 🤣

[lastlib]

9. We'll never know who pushed him......

Many people say he was pushed off because he was an asshole from a family of assholes. I don't know if we can believe it, but many people say he was pushed.

Jus' sayin'.......

[Sogo]

58. Pushed by Putin's uncle, perhaps?

nt.

[Wiz Imp]

8. And while we're at it, why did weird JD Vance change his name 4 times?

His name at birth was James Donald Bowman. He is now James David Vance. Normal people don't change their names 4 times. Most people never change them at all (except for possibly adopting a spouse's surname)

[Warpy]

15. Apparently, daddy Bowman was an asshole, so his mother got rid of the Donald

and changed it to David so she wouldn't have any reminders of him. When she remarried Vance, I think JD got adopted. He decided JD sounded manlier than either James or David or any of the diminutives.

My own family went through a few name changes, none of them connected to fraud. Sometimes it was because locals couldn't pronounce the name. Other times, they were sick of the prejudice the surname engendered. It happens.

[wnylib]

27. The Vance name did not come from being adopted.

He had another surname between Bowman and Vance, but I don't remember now what it was.

Vance was his grandmother's surname. JD chose to change his name to Vance.

No wonder he is such a mess. So many names that he is in constant identity crisis not knowing who he is.

[ancianita]

30. The name before Vance was Hamel, from his stepfather.

[LilyBelle]

76. And Veronica Hamel played Joyce....Davenport!

The Drumpf that came over here sent a letter begging to go back, and they wouldn't take him.

[wnylib]

78. Thanks. I couldn't remember his stepfather's surname.

[ancianita]

81. Not a problem! Why should anyone remember his name, right? I hope by next year we never hear his name again.

We've already stared at this don't-give-a-damn trainwreck eight years longer than we should have had to. Can't wait until this darkness is way down in the hole.

[BattleRow]

34. An asshole by

ANY other name..

[Wiz Imp]

40. He had good reason to change his name once, not 4 times.

His last change to JD Vance was made shortly before he published his book. "Explaining why my name was J.D. Hamel would require a few additional awkward moments,” he writes in Hillbilly Elegy. Seems to me like it was calculated and probably related to writing the book.

[Warpy]

60. I guess he'd say he was EVOLVING

but given the malleability of his morals and ethics, we'd all call it something else.

[mucholderthandirt]

84. Lots of kids get adopted by stepfathers and their name is changed. Nothing to be ashamed of, or awkward about.

It actually happened to Bill Clinton. My youngest son's last name was changed by the state when the paternity test was done. I didn't ask for it, and by that time actually didn't want it to change, but it would have meant petitioning the courts, and a lawyer, which I couldn't afford, so I let it be. After my divorce I took back my maiden name, which was my father's last name.

[Probatim]

90. Changed his name because he didn't want any reminders of his asshole father?

What about women who would be forced to keep their rapist's baby? Shouldn't they have the same opportunity?

[wryter2000]

11. She was born at Kaiser Oakland

Oaktown

[Warpy]

14. Bavaria. Grandpappy Friedrich was a draft dodger, it's why he left

one jump ahead of the cops. He was a whoremaster her in the US, it's how the family got enough money so his son Fred and his mama could go into the house building business.

I don't think there was anything really sinister about the name change, he had no fear of being chased down and extradited. It was just how people in Queens pronounced "Drumpf" anyway, and he liked that there was a close English word.

Most people got their names changed via Ellis Island because they were illiterate and the clerks couldn't handle a lot of foreign names. A lot of people got named for the cities they were from and people from Africa had been stripped of their names and counties of origin altogether.

[ChazInAz]

20. Americans seem to have trouble with any name longer than "Smith".

When we emigrated from Hungary in 1956, the immigration officials struggled with our miles-long collection of names and spellings, not to mention that the patronymic goes before the given name and a lengthy list of deceased relatives' add-ons. Pronunciation was a problem. They thought "Kareli" was a little girl. I'm still not.
Hungarian is even more entertaining than English!

[wnylib]

49. When my aunt was researching our family tree,

she could not find a census listing for my great-great grandfather, Gottlieb Herd, a German Swiss from Bern.

She finally discovered it listed as Cutlip Herd from Bear, Germany. The census taker apparently could not understand his a German accent. The "g" in Gottlieb is pronounced with a guttural sound which is like a hard "k" but not as hard as the English "g."

The city of Bern would be pronounced like "Bairn," so the census taker heard it as "bear." When GG-Grandpa added that they were German Swiss, the census taker put it together as Bear, Germany and maybe thought that "Bear" was a German village near the Swiss border.

[JHB]

50. Sometimes it's just bureaucracy

Great-great granddad came over from Ireland in the 1850s. After my uncle went on a family history dig, we got to look over copies of his U.S. Army pay stubs from the Civil War. On the pay stubs, his name was spelled the way we're used to spelling it, with one "g". However, his signature used two g's. Evidently, when he enlisted, his name was written down the way the clerk heard it, not the way he spelled it, and somewhere along the line he just gave up and the 1-g version was the one that won out.

[ChazInAz]

87. That's why

Our family name ends with two "p"s, unlike the more common single one that some relatives have who immigrated in 1850. Branded us forever as newcomers! To be fair, that first immigrant was named "Vaszili", which became "Wesley"!

[Warpy]

57. I know, right?

People from Norway are named mostly from their places of origin, people couldn't handle all hose doubled "K" names. People who were literate realized what a PIA it was going to be in a country full of WASPs and just went around being called Bergen or Moss or whatever.

[BigMin28]

62. So true

My maiden name has 11 letters. It is spelled exactly how it sounds. Yet I have seen people's eyes sort of glaze over.

[Wednesdays]

37. Yeah, my grandfather came from Lithuania with the surname "Savage."

But the original Lithuanian name was probably closer to Savić or something.

[Warpy]

59. Most of them were misrepresented as having "IS" as the finial

which caused a hell of a lot of confusion in my 30% Greek student body high school.

Ellis Island, they sure screwed a lot up.

[4lbs]

70. That's what happened in the movie "The Godfather, Part II".

Mob Boss Vito Corleone was actually born Vito Andolini in the town of Corleone, Italy.

He came over by himself, as a kid to Ellis Island, New York at the turn of the 20th Century (around 1900).

The intake guard said "Son, what is your name?"

Another guard talked to him in Italian, and then looked at his tag and said "Vito Andolini, from the town of Corleone."

The guy said and wrote down "Vito... Corleone". And viola! His *NEW* name.

[JustAnotherGen]

71. My Great Grandfather

Mom's "Opa". . . he, his parents, brothers all dropped the Von and the umlaut ö right before we entered WWI. They had been here since the 1850's, family had served in the Civil War for the USA - but they made a move to serve their business interests. Pretty rough for German Americans during the lead up to our entry in WW 1.

[Warpy]

82. The grandfather I never met did that one

He got sick of replacing his mailboxes, so he Anglicized the whole thing. It put my Irish grandmother's nose out of joint, it had been considered quite a coup to attract a "von," even though the blood had run mighty thin by then. It wasn't why she kicked him out or why he and my mother were estranged, but it didn't help. He died when I was 3. I never met him. I don't even have a picture.

[PortTack]

16. Adolph von goring trump....too bad he doesn't have a cyanide tablet

[Wednesdays]

39. Or a Walther PPK pistol. nt

[Evolve Dammit]

18. Lawrence O'Donnell did an excellent piece on the Drumpfs

And his grandfather’s deportation from Bavaria after pleading with the king to let him stay in a “beautiful letter.”

[Frank D. Lincoln]

21. Going on the offensive is the key to defeating Trump.

Have you noticed that Trump's main strategy is to always attempt to keep his opponents on the defensive?

Turn the tables on him from now until November and keep him on the defensive.

[LudwigPastorius]

22. Kallstadt

...but, Friedrich, Trump's grandaddy, was kicked out of the country for shirking his military duty.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/21/trump-grandfather-friedrich-banished-germany-historian-royal-decree

So, he went to Alaska and became a pimp.

[moose65]

35. Actually he had already emigrated to the US

According to the article, he returned to Germany and got married, moving his bride to the US. She became homesick and wanted to move back to Germany, but they wouldn’t let him because he had not completed his military service. Oh, if they had only allowed him to come back….

[FakeNoose]

51. I'm spitballin' here ...

... but Grandpa Friedrich could have returned to Bavaria if he had offered a tribute to King, or else to the Kaiser. They probably would have taken the young couple back even though he hadn't done his military duty.

The fact that he wasn't allowed in, tells us everything.

[LessAspin]

23. 84

84 year old John Cleese is a great twitter follow

https://www.democraticunderground.com/127010563

[maveric]

61. Thank you for that.

I didn’t realize that some,of them were that old. Or still alive.

[Dem2theMax]

80. I feel so young after watching that!

And I'll be coming up on 70 in a few years.

[mucholderthandirt]

85. I'll be 67 in February, I'm always shocked to see how young people I used to think were old back then are. :D

Hm. That's not clear even to me. What I wanted to say was, people I used to think were old when I was young now don't seem so old, from this new perspective. When I was a kid, 30 was ancient. Now as I approach 70 like an express train, 100 seems less old. More like a slightly older version of me.

I guess every generation feels the same. Remember "never trust anyone over thirty"? Yeah. Thirty-year-olds are like babies to me now!

Probably still all that clear, but I think it makes more sense. Hopefully.

[Dem2theMax]

89. It does make sense.

I did have quite a shock last weekend. My 50th high school reunion. I didn't go, best friend did, and she sent pictures to me during the reunion. I was shocked to see how old everyone was! They all looked like my parents, when my parents got older, and their hair turned gray.

How the heck did all of my classmates turn into my parents, all of them looking like great-grandparents?

I have to admit, I hit the gene lottery. When I turned 61, everyone thought I was 41. I'm just now starting to look a bit older, but I don't look anything like all those old people I saw in the photos at the reunion!

I never had a problem with my age, until I started seeing it show up in the mirror!

[rockbluff botanist]

24. Establishing a family tradition

DRAFT DODGING - European wars

[travelingthrulife]

26. My family name was changed by the post office

It was a Norwegian/Swedish area and there were too many Svensons, or sons of Sven, to deliver the mail properly.

[Irish_Dem]

32. Can we run the Trumps back to Germany?

[malaise]

42. The name change

In her book The Trumps, biographer Gwenda Blair mentions a Hanns Drumpf who settled in Kallstadt in 1608 and whose descendants changed their name from Drumpf to Trump during the Thirty Years' War.

[Irish_Dem]

45. Change their names back to Humpty Dumpty and send them back to Germany.

[malaise]

47. LO!

😂😀😂

[malaise]

36. LOL. - Historian finds German decree banishing Trump's grandfather

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/21/trump-grandfather-friedrich-banished-germany-historian-royal-decree

A historian has discovered a royal decree issued to Donald Trump’s grandfather ordering him to leave Germany and never come back.

Friedrich Trump, a German, was issued with the document in February 1905, and ordered to leave the kingdom of Bavaria within eight weeks as punishment for having failed to do mandatory military service and failing to give authorities notice of his departure to the US when he first emigrated in 1885.

Roland Paul, a historian from Rhineland-Palatinate who found the document in local archives, told the tabloid Bild: “Friedrich Trump emigrated from Germany to the USA in 1885. However, he failed to de-register from his homeland and had not carried out his military service, which is why the authorities rejected his attempt at repatriation.”

The decree orders the “American citizen and pensioner Friedrich Trump” to leave the area “at the very latest on 1 May ... or else expect to be deported”. Bild called the archive find an “unspectacular piece of paper”, that had nevertheless “changed world history”.

Lots more at link

[eppur_se_muova]

43. So, deprecation of military service runs deep in that family. nt

[malaise]

54. Very deep

:

[GreenWave]

53. This will totally PO the Nazi element of the GQP.

I used to post a photo of a Drumpf in the Nazi heirarchy. I can't find it anymore.

[malaise]

93. LOL

Keep on searching.
The US should banish him.

[IronLionZion]

92. You know that family is rotten when Germany didn't want them

[Nasruddin]

38. Rhineland Palatinate

Kallstadt (near Mannheim) as someone said
I think the family changed the spelling about 200 yrs ago - read that somewhere.
As to why - the local dialect is different from standard German but not as much as some others.
D - T and P - PF is historically unstable in that region - the local language is Pfaelzisch or Paelzisch depending
on who answers! Could also just be idiosyncratic change.

[FakeNoose]

56. Chump has a closer connection to Scotland than to Germany

He would actually want to go to Scotland (where his mother was born) but they won't let him move there. He can only get a visitor's visa that's good for a few weeks or maybe a month. Don't forget that Chump owns the golf resort in Scotland and he can only stay there a short time. But there are cousins and other relatives in Scotland, and I'm guessing he has at least met them.

I don't believe there has been any contact with distant relatives in Germany.

[Mysterian]

44. I'd love to drink a beer with John Cleese

but I'm afraid he'd find me incredibly boring.

[hoosierspud]

46. Same thing in my husband's family.

The one uncle who knew why they left and why they changed their name took the secret to his grave, in spite of many requests by family members to know the truth. One of the cousins and a nephew have been doing genealogy, but haven't uncovered the secret.

[BootOutTheGoons]

52. Transphobe says what?

[CanonRay]

55. My family changed our name by replacing an i with a y

My Sicilian cousins are still unhappy about it.

[struggle4progress]

63. Not sure ... maybe Burgerbraukeller?

[The Bopper]

64. So maybe

It was Hannibal Drumpf instead of Hannibal Lecter too I'm guessing.

[Vogon_Glory]

65. Didn't DU have some posts about it back in 2016-2017?

As I recall, Donald’s grandfather left Germany without performing his military service (It was some German principality that got rolled into Imperial Germany. It wasn’t Prussia). When Opa Trump tried to move back years later, the authorities balked, saying that Grandpa Trump hadn’t performed his military service.

Somebody have a proper citation, preferably with links?

[Harker]

67. But for a name change, he might have been John Cheese.

Not that the fact diminishes his point.

[carpetbagger]

68. It's pretty common for German surnames.

They get shortened and standardized over time, especially with some of the less distinct consonants (like d/t, which are combined in the soundex system). My own German surname lost a ch and a few vowels and gained a consonant before my gt gt grandfather left, probably like Trump's family, to avoid the draft. And really, ditching the imperial German war machine was not the wrong thing.

[Cha]

69. TY & John Cleese!!

[3auld6phart]

74. GrandfatherDrumpfh ws

A purveyor of prostitutes a pimp in Yukon Canada during the Gold Rush.

[tclambert]

79. I think the family's original German name was Arschloch

and Drumpf was a shortened form of Dummkopf.

[ShazzieB]

83. I can answer John Cleese's questions, but he may be disappointed. 😉

There's a book called The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate by Gwenda Blair that delves into Trump's family background. She traces the family history all the way back to the 1600s. She says that the spelling of the family name was changed from Drumpf to Trump during the Thirty Years’ War (1618 to 1648). (She doesn't say why the change occurred; the explanation may be lost in the mists of time.)

Trump’s grandfather and some of his siblings immigrated to the U.S. late in the 19th century for the same reasons a lot of people did at the time: to escape poverty and seek better financial prospects.

Friedrich, the fourth of six children, was just eight years old when his father, Johannes, died in July 1877. Johannes left a lot of debt, and according to Blair, mom Katharina Trump struggled to make ends meet.

Blair says the financial prospects for Friedrich and his siblings in Germany were pretty bleak. His oldest sister, Katharina, eventually decided to emigrate to the U.S. with her husband to look for better opportunities, and Friedrich joined them 2 years later, at the age of 16. It seems clear that the motivation was simple economics. It paid off, too. Friedrich was ambitious and hard working, and he eventually became quite wealthy.

So, no, Mr. Cleese, there really wasn't anything suspicious or sinister about either the Trump family name change or his grandfather's coming to America! Sorry about that. It's an interesting story, though. At least the rags to riches immigrant story of Friedrich seeking his fortune in America was pretty interesting. (I found the part about Friedrich's son Fred to be pretty dry at times, and the part about Donald was rather irritating, because he did so many stupid things. )

[Marcuse]

86. Trudeau trolls Trump with an old photo of his grandfather's whorehouse in Calgary, Alberta.

[DFW]

88. The Trump ancestral home is a small farming town

It is known as Pferdescheisse

Their name was shortened from Trumpelstiltzkin when immigration officials found that no member of the family could remember any word with over five letters.