Reason #29: Names
Why do we need to defeat Donald Trump and ensure that a Democrat occupies the White House?
Today we will take a break from the disheartening consideration of Donald Trump’s business machinations, depredations and bungling mismanagement to look at something simple, something prosaic – names.
Let’s start with Democratic presidential and vice-presidential candidates Kamala Devi Harris and Tim Walz.
Timothy James Walz was born in small town Nebraska to James F. Walz, a war veteran and school superintendent and Darlene Reiman. Tim is, of course, a common nickname for Timothy.
Kamala, which Republicans deliberately disrespectfully pronounce “Kam” a la, is properly pronounced “comma-la”. I wear a T-shirt that simplifies the pronunciation as “,la” and suspect that you will be seeing many more like it in coming days.
Kamala and Devi derive from her mother’s Sanskrit and mean respectively “lotus” and “heavenly”; thus, no more complicated than say “rose” or “violet” or “daisy” as a girl’s name. The surname “Harris” is from her father. Her parents, mother Shyamala Gopalan, from India and her father, Donald Harris, from Jamaica, met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. Her mother is a distinguished endocrinologist and breast cancer researcher. Her father is an economist, the first African American to hold a tenured faculty position at Stanford university. Her parents were thus both highly accomplished academics at prestigious universities.
She is married to attorney Doug Emhoff but kept her own surname in professional life.
Now things start to get weird.
Let’s move on to vice-presidential candidate James David “JD” Vance. He was born James David Bowman. Huh? Not Vance? His father Donald Ray Bowman wed Beverly Carol Vance. When his parents divorced, his mother remarried and changed his name to James Hamel (for her third husband). To preserve the nickname JD, she also changed his middle name to David, i.e. James David Hamel. Shortly before his graduation from Yale, JD changed his surname to Vance, that of the grandparents who raised him.
Donald Trump’s original family name in Germany was Drumpft. This morphed into Drumpf over time. His grandfather’s immigration papers list the name as Trumpf. His grandfather changed the name again to Trump. Friedrich Trump married Elisabeth Christ and christened his son Frederick Christ Trump. Fred dropped the “h” from his middle name i.e. from “Christ” to “Crist”. Why? Lots of changes to get to plain old Donald Trump.
But it turns out that “Trump” is very important. Donald Trump at one point boasted that the Trump “brand name” alone was worth three billion dollars! In many instances, those large buildings, bearing the name TRUMP in tall golden letters, were not built by Donald, nor does he have an investment in them. He merely rents his iconic Trump tradename out to real estate developers and merchandisers. More on this tomorrow.
Many investors, who mistakenly assumed that a glitzy real estate development investment opportunity bearing the Trump brand, was bolstered by actual dollars, have learned, to their great sorrow, that such was not the case. Multiple lawsuits have addressed this contentious topic.
John Oliver has presented his comic views on the Drumpf name and brand.
Have a heart; use your mind, search your conscience, and vote for Democratic candidates – across the ballot – on November 5th, 2024.
Please share this message with your friends and please, add your thoughts, to expand upon what are only brief sketches here.
Fred Grannis
August 16, 2024