Fewer Than 400 Babies Were Named Donald in 2025, the Fewest Ever Recorded in the U.S
The name held a spot in the top 100 for more than five decades, all the way through 1990, before parents started walking away from it.
Florida tells the story in miniature: exactly 21 babies there were named Donald in 2025, tying it with Abner and Enoch and leaving it behind Maximus and Keanu.
Donald isn’t alone in the freefall. Ronald, its closest sibling on the charts, has slid from hundreds of thousands of babies a decade in the 1950s to barely clinging to the bottom of the top 1,000.
Gary, once a top-10 name with nearly 39,000 births in its peak year, is now so rare that some recent years show it trending toward double-digit annual births. Larry just dropped out of the top 1,000 entirely for the first time in its modern history.
On the girls’ side, Linda (once a #1 name with 90,000-plus births in a single year), Patricia, Deborah, and Susan have all collapsed from mid-century dominance to near-extinction for newborns.
The slide started in the mid-1930s, long before Donald Trump entered politics, but it sharpened around 2016 and 2017 and kept falling into his second term. The name briefly climbed back into the top 1,000 in 2017, then dropped out and hasn’t returned.
Thanks for reading Thought Catalog. Show us some love on Facebook, and discover more on our website.
