Matthew Ellis
Matthew Ellis is the President of the United States in 2012 in Earth-199999, formerly alongside Vice President Rodriguez.[note 1]
Biography
In 2010, President Ellis helped executives from the Roxxon oil company get off scot-free after a disastrous oil spill. In 2012, after a series of foreign attacks and threatening messages to the U.S. from the terrorist leader known as the Mandarin, Ellis unveiled a rebranding of James Rhodes' War Machine armor known as Iron Patriot. Rhodes was tasked with tracking down signals from Mandarin's messages, but this only led to him being captured in Pakistan, unknown to any government officials. A particularly threatening message from the Mandarin was directed to Ellis himself: he threatened to shoot and kill Thomas Richards, an accountant for Roxxon, if the President didn’t call within 30 seconds: the appropriate number had been mysteriously added to Ellis' phone some time earlier. Ellis made the call, but Mandarin didn't answer and apparently shot Richards anyway. He concluded by once more threatening Ellis and boasting that nothing could be done to stop him. In truth, Mandarin was a front created by Aldrich Killian of A.I.M. in order to fuel and profit off of the war on terror, and the Richards execution had been faked. Ellis boarded Air Force One, ostensibly to be protected by Iron Patriot. In fact, the suit had been claimed by Killian's henchman Eric Savin, who killed several people onboard and sent the Iron Patriot suit with President Ellis down to Killian's commandeered oil tanker in Miami. This tanker was the Norco, a symbol of his past failures. Killian intended to kill Ellis on live television on behalf of the "Mandarin," stringing him up high above the deck of the Norco inside the Iron Patriot suit. Killian's plan was thwarted, and himself killed, by the combined efforts of Rhodes, Iron Man, and Pepper Potts, and Rhodes retrieved the suit and flew Ellis to safety. After Killian's death, Vice President Rodriguez was linked to cooperating with Killian's plot and was arrested.[1]
Notes
- ↑ Assuming Earth-199999's United States follows the same election standards as our universe, and knowing that Ellis is still president after early 2013, this means that Rodriguez and Ellis were elected in 2008, and inaugurated the following year.
References
- ↑ Iron Man 3. Dir. Black, Shane. Perf. Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Rebecca Hall, Stéphanie Szostak, James Badge Dale, Jon Favreau, and Ben Kingsley. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2013.