The New York Times seems to have been caught mockingly referring to Donald Trump as “Drumpf,” the ancestral last name of the president’s family, jokingly popularized by his late-night critic John Oliver in 2016.
The discovery was made by self-described “disaffected liberal” commentator Tim Pool on Friday. In the NYT’s Thursday article, correspondent Anemona Hartocollis seemed to have written about Yale University’s confrontation with “the Drumpf administration” over admission policies.
The lettering had been corrected at some point, but the original spelling has been archived.
The incident started a round of bashing the paper of record on Twitter, with Pool himself going as far as to say that it is “not a news company.”
The New York Times is not a news company pic.twitter.com/g76FBGjogE
His take on the outlet found a lot of support, with people saying that it “never has been” and that the NYT is just a “personal blog.”
Not honest journalism
Yeh, more of a personal blog really pic.twitter.com/RF4VprI4km
Other Twitter users laughed off the “Drumpf” incident as a petty and unsubstantive attack on the US president.
Pool did have his critics, saying that he was overreacting and the spelling mistake was an honest typo.
Get to the bottom of that typo Tim!
For some, that was hard to believe, because the last name “Drumpf” was widely popularized by the infotainment show “Last Week Tonight.” It had a famous bit about how the then-candidate Trump’s German family anglicized their last name.
At the time, the show gained some controversy regarding the validity of the name-change claims. The experts seem to have concluded it did happen, but in the 17th century, much earlier than host John Oliver claimed.
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