Mystery surrounds the exact timing, but at some point, possibly as late as the turn of the twentieth century, the forebears of the President of the United States dropped their German name, Drumpf, and became the Trumps.

It seems unlikely that they noticed that, in far-away England, their new name was a slang term for an unpleasant bodily function. To quote the OED, a “trump” is “the act of breaking wind audibly”. The dictionary’s first citation is from Farmer and Henley’s Slang and its Analogues (1902), but as a verb it is recorded as early as 1552, in Richard Huloet’s Abecedarium Anglo-Latinum, an English-Latin dictionary: “Trump or let a crakke, or fart, crepo.”

The explanation is that “trump” was the original name for what we know as the “trumpet”. From the French trompe, the word came into English at the turn of the fourteenth century. It is used in the Cursor Mundi, the anonymous verse history of the world composed around 1300: “Wit harp and pipe, and horn and trump.” It also appears in the Wycliffite Bible of the late fourteenth century, but by the time of the Tudor bibles it had been replaced by “trumpet”, from the French trompette, that name originally signifying a smaller version of the brass instrument.