Donald Trump was a character in the 1980s comic strip Bloom County, and was roughly based on the real life Donald Trump. The story in the comic book was that Donald Trump, billionaire had been hit by the anchor of his yacht and needed to transplant his brain into the body of Bill the Cat, who was brain dead. This occurred in the last year of the strip, filling the last collection, Happy Trails. The humor, such as it was, came from the ridiculousness of a powerful billionaire's mind residing in the body of an oft-dead cat. The chance for Donald Trump's value system to clash with the gentle Opus the Penguin also led to some obvious possibilities. For example, on one occasion Opus philosophical comments that we are only really borrowing our possessions in our short time on earth, and Donald Trump is forced into near catatonia on taking this literally.
On the whole, I didn't like the addition of the character of Donald Trump, for much of the same reason that I find the later Bloom County to be less enjoyable than the early one. The early Bloom County was both imaginative and realistic, and dealt more heavily with character interaction. The later Bloom County grew increasingly surreal and full of pop culture trivia and reference, and the insertion of Donald Trump was part of that. However, something should also be said for hindsight from 2008. The reader of this has probably read, at least in passing, dozens of webcomics based on surreal and improbably premises. Twenty years ago, this was not the case. Upon opening our comics pages, we were mostly confronted with Hi and Lois, a comic strip about how the dad was lazy and liked to golf too much. Or we could read Bloom County, a strip where a plot line could revolve around the insertion of the mind of a celebrity billionaire into the body of a ex-cocaine addict cat who had run for president and died numerous times. In that context, inserting a real life person as a fictional character into a comic strip is a stroke of genius.