5 of the Internet's Best Pranks on Donald Trump
Anonymous isn't the only tech group opposed to The Donald.
Anonymous recently announced a new offensive on Donald Trump to commence on April 1, this time promising “total war.” Their official target will be the website of the Trump Tower in Chicago, and they’ve already dumped a load of Trump’s personal information for the public to see.
But this isn’t the first time technology and the people who know how to wield it best have gone after the Republican front-runner. The tech world has proven to be anything but a friend of the man who still watches cable and reads the newspaper in hard copy. Trump’s not without his contributions to digital culture, though. After all, this is the most GIF-able politician ever we’re talking about.
1. The first Anonymous “War on Trump”
Anonymous first went to war against Trump after he said that the United States shouldn’t let Muslims into the country. In the December 2015 video about the attack, they warned Trump to “think twice before you speak anything,” and then proceeded to crash the Trump Tower New York website.
Then in early March, members of the group hacked their way into Trump’s voicemail. They snagged 35 voicemails and released them to Gawker, as well as updated his voicemail greeting message. While their actions didn’t reveal any information more shocking than the things that Trump says out loud, it was still a nice reminder that the trolls haven’t forgotten The Donald.
2. Jeff Bezos offers to send Trump to space
People have voiced their intention to move to Canada if Trump is elected president (here’s how to actually do it), but Jeff Bezos has a less taxing plan: Just send Trump to space.
The founder of Amazon and private space company Blue Origin went after Trump after he tweeted that the Washington Post (also owned by Bezos) is “going out of its way to tell failing candidates how to beat Donald Trump.”
So Bezos offered Trump the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: Be the first Blue Origin rocket customer to go sent to space. Donald, baby, think about it! This is a great deal!
3. Rice University students “Make Python Great Again”
Sam Shadwell and Chris Brown, junior computer science majors at Rice University, kicked off the new year by creating TrumpScript, a version of the programming language Python that acts like Donald Trump.
Essentially, TrumpScript is Python but with Trump-inspired phrases, numbers, and logic. The rules include, but are not limited to, such features as: all code must be made in America, all programs must end with “America is great,” and TrumpScript is a language that is “completely case insensitive.”
4. John Oliver makes Donald Drumpf again
Last Week Tonight host John Oliver took his time going after Trump on his show, but when he did, he did it big.
Oliver slammed Trump in a 22-minute segment that concluded with a call to arms to refer to Trump by his original family name, “Drumpf.” The campaign included the hashtag #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain, a Donald J. Drumpf Twitter account, and a Google Chrome extension that replaced every mention of “Trump” with “Drumpf.”
Why? Because Drumpf is “the sound produced when a morbidly obese pigeon flies into the window of a foreclosed Old Navy.”
5. Wired accidentally goes after Trump
On the topic of Google Chrome extensions, a hilarious word-changing extension caused Wired to release a correction to end all corrections. We’re sure they’re not the only ones to make that mistake — just search any website for “Drumpf” — assuming you too don’t have your own extension running — to find accidental inclusions.
Needing a story correction isn't always a bad thing.
6. Silicon Valley and Republican politicians secretly meet to plan Trump’s demise
This isn’t exactly a prank, but a grouping of tech executives meeting Justice League-style still makes for an entertaining visual. Perhaps the most revealing sign of how much the world of technology doesn’t care for Trump was a report of a secret meeting between Silicon Valley big shots and Republican policymakers in early March.
Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Larry Page, Tesla’s Elon Musk (he says he wasn’t involved), and Facebook investor Sean Parker all allegedly met with a list of Republicans including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan. The event was closed to the press, so the exact details of what went down are hazy. What is clear is that Trump was a major topic of conversation.
“A specter was haunting the World Forum — the specter of Donald Trump,” Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard told The Huffington Post in an email. “There was much unhappiness about his emergence, a good deal of talk, some of it insightful and thoughtful, about why he’s done so well, and many expressions of hope that he would be defeated.”
Regardless of any actions that come from that meeting, Anonymous will take the lead on the tech war on Trump. And you can bet the man himself won’t know how to deal with whatever chaos Anonymous decides to rain down on him. This is the same guy who tweeted a call for a ban on Apple from an iPhone after all.
