My point about these Dutch names in the US, and German, Italian, Scandinavian, French, Irish, Greek, Jewish, Spanish, Slavic, etc. names, is that in the US the Anglo-Saxon descendants were a minority for many decades, if not centuries. A genetic profile would be interesting here. Even guys (and gals, of course) with British sounding names were often just ‘adaptations’, many a ‘Fisher’ was a ‘Visser” , and even Harding was reputedly of Dutch descent.
It is not always very clear, eg. although some contend that the name ‘Polk” is Scottish, derived from ‘Pollack” the fish, most genealogists attribute it to ‘Pollack’: from Poland.
Of course, the same is true for Canada, with it’s huge population of French descent, but much less for Oz and NZ.

I wonder if the failure to find an exact dafe etc is because the change was never done legally? I don’t know whether that was a requirement back then. Either way, if a baby’s name is registered with the surname Trump, that’s its legal name whatever the surname/s of the parents.

Trump: Friedrich Trump, the present Mr Trump’s grandfather apparently came from Kallstadt in Germany before emigrating to the US.
There is indeed a trope that it was changed from ‘Drumpf” , but I’m not sure that that is not apocryphical. Snopes appears to confirm, but my confidence in Snopes (contrary to most other ‘fact-investigating sites’) is not really high. At any rate there is no idea about when the name-change occurred, generally a weak sign.
All agree it was not ‘Tromp’, pace Maerten “Bestevaer” Harpertszoon.

Trump was originally Drumpf. That’s why many anti-Trump people use that name. They were much later immigrants – I think from Germany in the late 19th century. Trump’s grandfather. He or Trump’s father changed the family name by deed poll. There was an article about it not long after he announced his candidacy iirc.

Yes, definitely so. What NZ, Oz, Canada and the US share is that they took over land from indegenous populations. Denmark (mainly Greenland) and Holland (Indonesia, South Africa, Ceylon, Surinam and some Carribean islands) dabbled in that too, but they never took over in numbers of population, and lost or got rid of these territories.
Note that New York used to be Nieuw Amsterdam before it was swapped with Surinam and control of the ‘spice islands’ (Moluccas). It can still be heard in names like Harlem (Haarlem) and Brooklyn (Breukelen). Some notorious names ‘Van Buuren’, ‘Rooseveldt’, ‘Vanderbilt’, ‘Stuyvesandt’, ‘Schuyler’, ‘Van Winkle ,’Timmerman’, ‘Rutgers’, ‘Block’, ‘Hoeven’, ‘Ten Eck’ and indeed ‘De Vos’ come to mind. I’m not sure how many of these were later immigration.
Note that ‘Trump’ appears not related to the celebrated 17th Century Dutch admiral ‘Maarten Harpertzoon Tromp’. 🙂

I agree that the kind of society we and Canada have ended up with, especially in regard to international league tables, is very similar to Denmark and Holland. Peaceful, tolerant, low corruption levels etc. But in other ways I think we’re quite different.

I’m mainly thinking of four of us, and GB gets in on the act because that’s the origin of the dominant culture/history for us because at the moment a majority of us are of British descent. That’s rapidly changing of course, and it will not remain like that for many more decades.

We four are all fairly young societies that took over lands from indigenous populations. We haven’t had wars on our soil in the modern era. We don’t have uncontrolled migration, such as Europe is currently experiencing from the Middle East. We have more environmentally wasteful societies because we have big countries with relatively few people, lots of natural beauty, few worries about things like food and water, stable governments (despite the current debacle in the US).

Anyway, that’s where my reasoning comes from. There are plenty of arguments for what you say too.

I think Pinker is right too, and mankind is improving. We sure need to!

Re “Five Eyes” (never heard about it before, but I get it is an intelligence sharing agreement), I think that eg. NZ or Canada and, say, Denmark or Holland, are very much more culturally comparable to each other from many pov’s than any of them to the US.

Yes, you are right, it is not an excuse, but it is not really an explanation either, it hints at an explanation, which is probably along the lines of in-group/out-group bias.
In fact, it is cause for optimism that that photo appears revolting to most of us nowadays (I guess). Maybe -well I’m sure he is- Pinker was right in his “Better Angels of Our Nature”.
With all the hiccups, Mr Trump (including Mr Pruitt, Mr McConnell, Mr Kobach, Ms DeVos, etc.) being a small one (I hope) and Islamic Fundamentalism a bigger one (I fear), humankind is improving.

There is no excuse. It is an explanation.

The pic is very recent. I think of the Five Eyes group (NZ Aus GB Canada USA) as being very similar culturally these days, though the US is a bit of an outlier on guns, health, and religion. This was illegal even in the US at the time with its recent history of slavery and rampant racism in the South.

Like parts of the US, Australia still has a significant problem with racism. It’s a problem everywhere of course. Humanity still hasn’t evolved to a place where racism is gone. We still have some problematic instincts re out-groups. But some places are worse than others.