Donald Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American businessman, politician, television personality, author, and the probable nominee of the Republican Party for President of the United States in the 2016 election. He is chairman of The Trump Organization, which is the principal holding company for his real estate ventures and other business interests. After graduating from college, Trump was given control of his father’s real estate development firm and has since built casinos, golf courses, hotels, a New York City neighborhood, and other real estate properties, many of which bear his name, and founded Trump Entertainment Resorts. Listed by Forbes as one of the world’s wealthiest people, Trump and his businesses, as well as his three marriages, have received prominent media exposure. He hosted The Apprentice, a popular reality television show on NBC, from 2004 to 2015.
Exactly four years ago, on February 29, 2012, I created the 8-bit Purple Squirrel in honor of Leap Year. The story behind that character is one of eye-catching strangeness and an unsettling fear of its existence. The reason for creating 8-bit Donald Trump is kind of the same. This orange-tinted populist con-artist is the absolute worst, and he may be the world’s greatest troll. Trump is a racist, sexist, authoritarian narcissist who represents the culmination of 30 years of antipolitics. And he doesn’t seem to be going away, because evidently America made him unstoppable. Happy Leap Year?
Update: It got even worse. I had to add this 8-bit character to my U.S. president series as #27 of 44.
Deadpool (real name Wade Winston Wilson) is a fictional antihero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by artist/writer Rob Liefeld and writer Fabian Nicieza, the character first appeared in The New Mutants #98 (February 1991). Initially Deadpool was depicted as a supervillain when he made his first appearance in The New Mutants and later in issues of X-Force, but later evolved into his more recognizable antiheroic persona. Deadpool is a disfigured and mentally unstable mercenary with the superhuman ability of an accelerated healing factor and physical prowess. He is known as the “Merc with a Mouth” because of his talkative nature and tendency to break the fourth wall, which is used by writers for humorous effect and running gags.
Harper Lee, born Nelle Harper Lee (April 28, 1926 – February 19, 2016), was an American novelist widely known for To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Immediately successful, it won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and has become a classic of modern American literature. Though Lee had only published this single book, in 2007 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contribution to literature. She was also known for assisting her childhood friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood (1966). The plot and characters of To Kill a Mockingbird are loosely based on Lee’s observations of an event that occurred near her Monroeville, Alabama hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old. The novel deals with the irrationality of adult attitudes towards race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s, as depicted through the eyes of two children.
Note: Lee died in her sleep three days ago, on on the morning of February 19, 2016, aged 89. Last year another novel, Go Set a Watchman (2015), written in the mid-1950s, was controversially published as a “sequel,” though it was later confirmed to be To Kill a Mockingbird‘s first draft.
Billy the Kid, also known as William H. Bonney, was born William Henry McCarty Jr. (November 23, 1859 – July 14, 1881). He was an American frontier gunfighter, thief and murderer who participated in New Mexico’s Lincoln County War. Bonney is known to have killed eight men. After murdering a blacksmith during an altercation in 1877, Bonney became a wanted man in Arizona Territory and joined a group of cattle rustlers in New Mexico. He took part in the Lincoln County War and joined the Regulators, making him a well-known outlaw in the region. After one of many prison escapes, Bonney was ultimately shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner in 1881. Over the next several decades, legends grew that Bonney had not died that night, and a number of men claimed to be him.
Jesse James (September 5, 1847 – April 3, 1882) was an American outlaw, guerrilla, gang leader, bank robber, train robber and murderer from the state of Missouri. He was the most famous member of the James-Younger Gang, who were Confederate guerrillas or bushwhackers during the Civil War. They were accused of participating in atrocities committed against Union soldiers, including the Centralia Massacre. After the war, as members of various gangs of outlaws, they robbed banks, stagecoaches and trains. The James brothers were most active as members of their own gang from about 1866 until 1876. In 1882, Jesse James was killed by a member of his own gang who hoped to collect a reward. Already a celebrity when he was alive, James became a legendary figure of the Wild West after his death.
Frederick Douglass (c. February 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement from Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Douglass wrote several autobiographies in which he described his experiences as a slave and promoted the cause of abolition. After the Civil War, Douglass remained an active campaigner against slavery. Douglass also actively supported women’s suffrage, and held several public offices. In 1872, without his approval, Douglass became the first African-American nominated for Vice President of the United States as the running mate of Victoria Woodhull, on the Equal Rights Party ticket. Douglass was a firm believer in the equality of all peoples, whether black, female, Native American or recent immigrant.
Jules Verne (February 8, 1828 – March 24, 1905) was a French novelist, poet and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction. Early in life Verne wrote for magazines and the stage. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Verne has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism in France and most of Europe. Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare.
Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright and art collector. Born in Pittsburgh and raised in Oakland, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures in modernism in literature and art would meet, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound and Henri Matisse. Stein’s books include Q.E.D. (1903), Fernhurst (1904), Three Lives (1905-06), The Making of Americans (1902-1911) and Tender Buttons (1912). In the latter work, Stein comments on lesbian sexuality. In 1933, Stein published a kind of memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of Alice B. Toklas, her life partner. As a Jew living in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, Stein may have been able to save her life and sustain her lifestyle as an art collector through the protection of powerful Vichy government official Bernard Faÿ.
Ada, Countess of Lovelace was a British mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on the Analytical Engine, an early mechanical general-purpose computer invented by Charles Babbage. The engine was to be programmed using punched cards. Lovelace’s notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. Specifically, she developed an algorithm to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer. Lovelace was born on December 10, 1815 and died on November 27, 1852 at the age of 36.
Donald Trump – No. 965
Donald Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American businessman, politician, television personality, author, and the probable nominee of the Republican Party for President of the United States in the 2016 election. He is chairman of The Trump Organization, which is the principal holding company for his real estate ventures and other business interests. After graduating from college, Trump was given control of his father’s real estate development firm and has since built casinos, golf courses, hotels, a New York City neighborhood, and other real estate properties, many of which bear his name, and founded Trump Entertainment Resorts. Listed by Forbes as one of the world’s wealthiest people, Trump and his businesses, as well as his three marriages, have received prominent media exposure. He hosted The Apprentice, a popular reality television show on NBC, from 2004 to 2015.
Exactly four years ago, on February 29, 2012, I created the 8-bit Purple Squirrel in honor of Leap Year. The story behind that character is one of eye-catching strangeness and an unsettling fear of its existence. The reason for creating 8-bit Donald Trump is kind of the same. This orange-tinted populist con-artist is the absolute worst, and he may be the world’s greatest troll. Trump is a racist, sexist, authoritarian narcissist who represents the culmination of 30 years of antipolitics. And he doesn’t seem to be going away, because evidently America made him unstoppable. Happy Leap Year?
Update: It got even worse. I had to add this 8-bit character to my U.S. president series as #27 of 44.