Donald Trump (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver)

(pictured) was part of the third episode of Last Week Tonight third season. At the start of the episode's main segment, Oliver introduces the topic of Trump's presidential campaign. He refers to it, and his dark horse popularity among Republican voters and those who did not usually vote in presidential elections, as "America's back mole". Oliver says, "It may have seemed harmless a year ago, but now that it's become frighteningly bigger, it's no longer wise to ignore it." After summarizing his "unpredictable and entertaining" style and acknowledging his appeal to voters disenchanted with the American political establishment, Oliver criticizes Trump as a "serial liar". The comedian outlines that Trump had made dubious and unsubstantiated claims regarding his net worth, then lists several of Trump's failed businesses and investments, including some of his real estate properties. Oliver mentions that Trump claimed to have declined to appear on Last Week Tonight but had never been invited; that Trump was not self-funding his 2016 presidential campaign, despite saying otherwise; and that in an interview in the 2003 documentary Born Rich Trump's daughter Ivanka had said her father once portrayed himself as poorer than a homeless person. Oliver states that Trump had frequently threatened to file lawsuits against various people, but had never actually filed these lawsuits, and has settled lawsuits filed against him about his never-completed condominium developments despite Trump's claim that he never settles any of his legal disputes. Oliver next calls Trump inconsistent in the political views that he expressed during and prior to his campaign, saying that "he's been pro choice and pro life; he's been for and against assault weapon bans; in favor of both bringing in Syrian refugees and deporting them out of the country." Oliver states that during a phone-in interview on Fox & Friends, Trump had advocated killing families of suspected terrorists as part of his strategy to defeat ISIS, which would constitute a war crime under the laws of the Geneva Convention. The comedian criticizes Trump's claim not to know who Duke was, citing a 2000 NBC News interview in which Trump called Duke "a bigot [and] a racist"; Oliver notes that, having given such an answer despite the contradiction, Trump "is either racist or [is] pretending to be, and at some point, there's no difference there." In total, Trump was lying about three-fourths of the time, according to Oliver, who cited a PolitiFact study of the statements made by Trump since the launch of his presidential campaign. "Make Donald Drumpf Again" by referring to him as "Jonathan Leibowitz", the comedian's birth name. Oliver, an alumnus of Stewart's Daily Show, justified the "Drumpf" epithet by insisting that "[Trump] should be proud of his heritage!", parodying Trump's mockery of Stewart in a May 2013 Twitter post that Trump later denied having written. Oliver opines that the name "Drumpf" reflects Trump's true nature much more accurately, and says that if viewers wanted to vote for "the charismatic guy promising to make America great again", they should "stop and take a moment to imagine how [they] would feel if [they] just met a guy named Donald Drumpf—a litigious serial liar with a string of broken business ventures and the support of a former Klan leader who he can't decide whether or not to condemn." The request was rejected in May 2016 on the grounds that the proposed trademark would be based on a living person, i.e. Donald Trump, but that Trump had not given his written consent to trademark his name. After the segment, Oliver released a Google Chrome extension dubbed the "Drumpfinator", which changes all instances of "Trump" to "Drumpf" on webpages. He coined and displayed the hashtag "#MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain" during the segment. Oliver also registered the web domain "donaldjdrumpf.com" to provide free downloads of the "Drumpfinator" Chrome extension and sell red baseball caps branded with the slogan "Make Donald Drumpf Again". The "Make Donald Drumpf Again" caps, manufactured by Unionwear, were modeled after Trump's red "Make America Great Again" caps. == Reception and aftermath ==

Immediately after the segment aired, web searches for "Donald Drumpf" went viral. By March 1, the date on which the "Super Tuesday" primaries were held, Google Searches for "Donald Drumpf" had surpassed those for both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, two of Trump's rivals for the Republican presidential nomination. Other media also started reporting on Trump's "short fingers" shortly after the episode's broadcast, prompting Trump to write a Twitter post on March 1 in which he stated that he was not aware of any mockery of his "short fingers". By March 4, six days after the segment's air date, the "Drumpfinator" Chrome extension had received over 333,800 downloads and 5,800 reviews. The Drumpfinator and similar extensions resulted in multiple outlets accidentally replacing Trump's name. The American Jewish Congress announced the results of a poll of their members that referred to the candidate as "Donald Drumpf", which they later acknowledged was an accident caused by someone's use of the extension. Wired magazine published multiple articles replacing Trump's name with the phrase "Someone with Tiny Hands" in reference to the "Short-Fingered Vulgarian" meme, a result of another Chrome extension. said John Oliver (pictured in 2016) intended the episode to influence Americans to vote against Trump, who ultimately won the election. CNET's Chris Matyszczyk called the segment a "lengthy excoriation" of Trump and commented that Oliver's intents extended past "mere satire", influencing Americans to care enough to vote against Trump. After the segment, a Twitterbot named "DeepDrumpf" was created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Named after the Last Week Tonight segment, the bot uses neural network technology to post tweets in an imitation of Trump. The bot's creator stated that DeepDrumpf collects fragments of Trump's statements, noting their grammatical structure using artificial intelligence (AI), and outputs the resulting sentences based on what it learned about Trump's grammar style. He also said that if there were more data available, or even all the data that Facebook's AI system can analyze, then the neural network would be better able to mimic Trump. Within eight days of the original broadcast, the YouTube video of the segment surpassed 19 million views, making it Oliver's most watched segment. By comparison, the previous episode's main segment had a little over four million views on YouTube by that date. By the end of March, the segment had been viewed 23.3 million times on YouTube and 62 million times on Facebook, for a total of 85 million times on the two social media platforms, making its viewership "a record for any piece of HBO content". By March 8, ten days after the episode's broadcast, the donaldjdrumpf.com website had sold over 35,000 "Make Donald Drumpf Again" hats, comprising all the inventory on hand. The Chrome extension had also been downloaded 433,000 times.) Freelance journalist S. I. Rosenbaum, writing for the Washington Post, criticized Oliver's "Donald Drumpf" appellation as derisive of German Americans and other immigrant groups who anglicized their names upon immigration. Rosenbaum wrote that the phrase was reminiscent of Trump's own xenophobic statements in that it was part of a long-running trend of "bestowing foreign-sounding names to imply that the target isn't really an American." Oliver later said that the joke "got out of hand" and never used it on the show again. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, he said, "That joke became old for us very quickly. There's a reason we didn't use it again. It really is the song I skip past. It's 'Creep.' It's a good song, Thom Yorke! It was a good song when he wrote it." Alluding to the fact that the segment aired on the same night as the Oscars, the comedian also stated, "We were not doing [the episode] with the sense that it would become bigger than our show normally is", but the "Drumpf" appellation's later popularity "kind of slightly ruins the memory". ==Name change timing dispute==

, Germany. Frederick Trump, Donald Trump's grandfather, had immigrated to the United States that year. In their 2017 book Trump Revealed, Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher write that it is unknown when the "Trump" name was finalized. They further state that Trump family headstones in Kallstadt—the German village where Trump's grandfather was born—show various spellings of the family name "including Dromb, Drumb, Drumpf, Trum, Tromb, Tromp, Trumpf, and Trumpff". In U.S. immigration records from 1885, Friedrich's name is transcribed as "Friedr. Trumpf." the name under which he was processed when he entered the United States that year. Genealogy organization FamilySearch provided information on Friedrich Trump, listing his father as Johann Ii Trump. Gwenda Blair, Trump's longtime biographer, appeared in an interview with Deutsche Welle in 2015, where she stated, "Donald's] grandfather Friedrich Drumpf came to the United States in 1885" when he was 16 years old and Germans were immigrating to America in large numbers. In September 2015, after the genealogical website Ancestry.com released the lineages of several famous families—including the Trump and Astor families—the New York Daily News claimed that Frederick Trump had been given the name "Friedrich Drumpf" upon his birth in Germany in 1869. Other published sources said that the name change occurred in the 17th century. In the 2015 book The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate, an excerpt from which the John Oliver program used to cite the ancestral name disclosure for the segment, biographer Gwenda Blair wrote that the Trumps' family name was changed during the Thirty Years' War. She cited that one ancestor, named John Philip Trump, lived in the 17th century. Blair also wrote that Frederick Trump's original name was Friedrich Trump, and his father, born in the 19th century, was Johannes Trump. This position was endorsed by The Boston Globe, as well as by Daniel Victor, the New York Times reporter, who wrote, "Despite mistaken impressions, Mr. Trump and his recent relatives had nothing to do with the surname change. Mr. Oliver himself was careful to refer to a 'prescient ancestor'." In his 2013 book ''America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation'', Joshua Kendall wrote that Frederick's father and aunt, and by extension Donald Trump's great-grandfather and great-grandaunt, were called John Trump and Charlotte Luise Trump, respectively. ==See also==