If your last name is Drumpf or MacLeod, you might share bloodlines with the 47th president.
Donald Trump, 78, carries ancestral roots in both Germany and Scotland, and two surnames beyond his own have surfaced as possible indicators of distant family ties. The name Drumpf traces to his paternal grandfather, while MacLeod comes from his mother’s Scottish lineage.
Friedrich Drumpf was born in 1869 in Kallstadt, a village in southwestern Germany where the surname was common locally. At age 16, he crossed the Atlantic in 1885 and anglicized his name to Trump, a move reportedly motivated by a desire to sound more English-speaking and to put distance between himself and his German heritage. Some accounts also suggest he sought to avoid military service back home.
His early years in America involved work as a barber in New York before he headed west to Seattle. There, during the Canadian gold rush, he ran restaurants and lodging houses including one called the Poodle Dog. He returned to Kallstadt in 1901 to marry Elisabeth Christ, then bounced between Europe and the United States before settling permanently in New York with his family.
On the maternal side, Mary Anne MacLeod entered the picture. Born in 1912 in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, she made the journey to New York in 1930 and started out as a house servant. She met property developer Fred Trump, and the pair wed in January 1936. Their union produced five children, with Donald arriving in 1946 as the fourth of the bunch. Mary Anne died in 2000, one year after Fred.
The Trump surname itself remains relatively scarce in the United States. According to HowStuffWorks data from 2016, only 3,600 to 4,800 people carried the name across the country. The 2000 census ranked it as the 8,357th most common surname nationwide.
This rarity has put a spotlight on those who happen to share it. During Trump’s first presidential run in 2016, HowStuffWorks spoke with several Americans about the experience of bearing the same name as the candidate. Among them was a young woman who happened to match his daughter’s full name.
“Having the last name Trump has its ups and downs,” she said.
She detailed the confusion that came with the coincidence. “On social media, I have a Snapchat account which is the same username as his daughter’s Instagram,” she shared. “I get fan messages meant for her, as well as getting called an impostor when I tell them I am not Donald’s daughter. Sometimes with harsh responses.”
The Drumpf name gained broader public attention during the 2016 election cycle when comedian John Oliver launched a campaign encouraging viewers to “Make Donald Drumpf Again,” playing on the family’s original German surname. The bit went viral and briefly turned “Drumpf” into a cultural punchline, though it had long since disappeared from the family tree by the time Donald was born.
The MacLeod connection has drawn less mainstream attention but represents an equally valid genealogical thread. Scottish immigrants flooded into New York during the early twentieth century, and Mary Anne’s path from the Outer Hebrides to domestic service in Queens followed a familiar pattern for young women from her region seeking economic opportunity abroad.
Neither surname offers any guarantee of relation, of course. Drumpf was common enough in Kallstadt that unrelated families surely carried it, and MacLeod ranks among the most widespread surnames in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. But for Americans with either name in their family trees, the presidential connection provides at least a conversation starter about nineteenth-century German villages and twentieth-century Scottish emigration.
Trump himself has periodically emphasized his Scottish roots, particularly at his golf properties in Aberdeen and Turnberry, while his German heritage has been a more complicated element of his personal narrative given his grandfather’s apparent efforts to downplay it.
The president’s next scheduled public appearance is a rally in Duluth, Georgia.