Last Week Tonight Renames Trump

2016

Date: 28 February 2016 · Place: HBO · YouTube · Figures: John Oliver, host · Donald Trump, candidate · Friedrich Drumpf, Trump's grandfather (genealogical hook) · Tags: LateNight, BrandAttack, ChromeExtension 01. Make Donald Drumpf Again On 28 February 2016 John Oliver devotes twenty-one minutes of Last Week Tonight to the Trump candidacy. The segment ends by pointing out that the candidate's ancestral surname, before a nineteenth-century anglicization, was Drumpf, and urges the audience to use the original name as a small ritual deflation. Within forty-eight hours the segment has fifteen million YouTube views. A 'Drumpfinator' Chrome extension swaps every instance of Trump on a webpage to Drumpf. The merch store sells caps reading MAKE DONALD DRUMPF AGAIN. 02. The Limit of Satirical Renaming The campaign is the high-water mark of the liberal hope that a viral mock of Trump's name would degrade him. It does not. He wins the Republican nomination in May, the presidency in November. The episode now reads as evidence that satire identifying a candidate as ridiculous mistakes ridicule for refutation, a lesson the late-night format declines to fully absorb for the next six years. "If you are thinking of voting for Donald Trump, the charismatic guy promising to make America great again, stop and take a moment." — John Oliver, Last Week Tonight, 28 February 2016 Sources • Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, season 3 episode 3, HBO, 28 February 2016 • Megan Garber, 'Donald Drumpf and the Politics of Bullying,' The Atlantic, 29 February 2016 • Know Your Meme, 'Make Donald Drumpf Again'