A Boy Named Trump

The story of the Claymont boy who was bullied because his last name is Trump made the news in Delaware a few weeks ago, but it didn’t seem worth much attention at the time — there are lots of people named Trump in this country, about 5,000 of them according to Wikipedia, almost a fifth of them in Pennsylvania, having arrived in the 18th century with Amish immigrants. It seemed a weak counterweight to all the stories from the South and West of white high school students chanting “Trump!” or “Build that wall!” at sports teams from schools with large minority populations.
Today, of course, no triviality goes unexploited for long, so little Joshua Trump will be the guest of the White House at the Big Trump’s State of the Union address (I had hoped for cancellation of this false and commercial spectacle regardless of the reason, but that’s another story).

Good for Josh, but this shameless use of the kid for political purposes will fade into memory someday, while he’ll be stuck with the Trump name the rest of his life. What will that be like? It just so happens that there are a small group of people who could tell him. In fact, somebody made an entire documentary about what it’s like to bear the surname Hitler, and there are more of them that you might realize. The documentary is naturally called “Meet the Hitlers,” which is not named for the Monty Python sketch.