Trum-
Excited to vote for future presidents Bill Eisenhamper, Amy Forb, Ethan Obample, and Abigail Washingtoast.
Excited to vote for future presidents Bill Eisenhamper, Amy Forb, Ethan Obample, and Abigail Washingtoast.
The President of the United States, at the time when this comic was published, was Donald Trump and he shares the first letters of his surname with Harry S. Truman, who was US President between 1945 and 1953. Megan notes that both of these presidents' last names start with "T-R-U-M", but she also states that they are not related.
There were several presidents of the US who even have the exact same last name. For example, John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams, and the more recent father and son George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. Similarly Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt are 5th cousins. Grandfather and grandson William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison also share a last name. And there are the two most distantly related presidents with the same surname, both Andrew Johnson and Lyndon B. Johnson have the last name of Johnson (7 letters), although the shared last name is coincidental, given they do not share any relatives with the name Johnson.
Besides T-R-U-M- and the cases of identical names, the longest common surname prefix is H-A-R (3 letters), shared by William Henry (or Benjamin) H-A-R-rison and Warren Gamaliel H-A-R-ding. If Kamala Harris had prevailed in the 2024 presidential election, she would have brought the record up to 6 letters, sharing her entire last name with the first six letters of the two Harrisons. (The next longest common surname prefixes are B-U-, shared by James B-U-chanan and George (H.) W. Bush; and C-L-, shared by Grover Cleveland and Bill Clinton.). The longest common suffix (not counting identical names) is also 4 for I-S-O-N for James Madison and the two Harrison presidents. Interestingly, the name HARRISON contains both the second-longest common prefix and the longest common suffix among non-identical president surnames.
The joke is that the matching of those few letters is the least weird thing. Trump's presidency is commonly considered weird in ways too varied to concisely list in this article. Both Megan and Cueball seem to agree on this.
The title text lists "absurd" last names that could start with the same letters as other presidents: Bill Eisenhamper, Amy Forb, Ethan Obample, and Abigail Washingtoast. These would refer to Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Barack Obama, and George Washington.