He was Donald J. Trump before Donald Trump successfully ran for president in 2016. A tough-talking businessman worth billions who spoke in plain English and struggled for worker’s rights, Ross Perot (as well as Pat Buchanan) was the progenitor of the modern-day “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement.
Perot was a nationalist-populist in the same vein as Trump. In fact, the initial Trump presidential campaign, which occurred in the year 2000, was fought not for control of the Republican Party but instead for dominance in the Reform Party—the very same political party that Perot had helped to create during his ill-fated presidential bid in 1991.
Perot and Trump shared many similarities.
Hard-charging, funny, plainspoken, and direct, these two men appealed to the mostly white, Working-Class Americans who had fallen hard on their luck since President Richard Nixon opened the United States to China and, a few years later, after President Jimmy Carter presided over the massive deindustrialization craze that occurred in the American Midwest—sending good-paying, strategically important manufacturing jobs to places like China. Although himself part of the same class that benefited from the deindustrialization of the American Midwest, Perot was never supportive of the move.
Ross Perot: An Outsider for Life
Like Trump, he was an outsider warning of the dangers our feckless, lazy, and greedy bipartisan elite posed to the rest of the country. There can be little doubt that Perot’s concern—shared both by Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump—about the national security and economic dangers rapid deindustrialization posed to the country were well-founded.
Of course, at the time, Perot sounded like an alarmist. And the bipartisan elite went one further: they said Perot was deranged and that he was the threat to the post-Cold War order that was being built at the time.
Certainly, Ross Perot was a bit gonzo (again, just like the forty-fifth president). But he was a Cassandra warning about the greatest danger facing the United States—that all but a relatively small section of the population felt or was even remotely aware of—that being deindustrialization. Like the original Cassandra in Greek mythology, the clairvoyant who could predict anyone’s future, Perot was consigned to be ignored by those he was offering prescient prognostications to.
Another clairvoyant, Pat Buchanan, infamously lamented in 2017 that “the ideas made it, but I didn’t”. Like Perot and, later, Trump, Buchanan would be castigated by the vainglorious elite as being like, a total Nazi…or something (prompting even Chris Matthews to defend Buchanan’s honor).
Come to think of it, during the hotly contested 2000 Reform Party primary it was Trump who had labeled Buchanan as a racist (just as Trump is now besmirching the next best hope for the Republican Party, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis).
Because the country was riding so high following the unanticipated victory in the Cold War, few felt the negative impacts of deindustrialization. That was still a decade or two off. Perot was also running out of spite. He hated Republican President George H.W. Bush and wanted to spoil the forty-first president’s hotly anticipated reelection bid.
Bush vs. Perot: Really Ugly & Mean
According to former Bush ’41 confidant and secretary of state, James Baker, Ross Perot resented the forty-first president for an episode that occurred during the Reagan Administration, when Bush was vice-president. Just a few short years after the horrific Vietnam War, many people—including Perot—were convinced that the North Vietnamese had kept many Americans as prisoners of war long after they were supposed to repatriate them.
There was a movement to assemble a blue-ribbon congressional panel (which ultimately did happen during the presidency of George H.W. Bush) to investigate claims that many Americans were still languishing under the brutal yoke of North Vietnamese communist captors.
As a major donor for the Republican Party, Perot wanted to bring the boys home. It was then-Vice-President Bush who had the unfortunate job of explaining to Perot that neither President Ronald Reagan nor any other expert in Washington agreed with Perot’s belief that Americans had been left behind. Baker later recounted that the relationship between Perot and Bush “got really ugly and mean”.
Another One Perot Got Right (Probably)
For the record, like his opposition to deindustrialization of the American Heartland, there are many data points that lend themselves to Perot’s claim that the US government abandoned possibly up to 1,300 POWs in Vietnam, with live sightings of suspected American POWs being made as late as 1989. Rather than deal with Perot’s claims, the government engaged in a systematic cover-up.
In fact, Secretaries of Defense Melvin Laird and James Schlesinger, who ultimately both testified to the United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, stated that former President Richard Nixon was never convinced that all the POWs came home, despite having told the American people that all living POWs had been returned by the Hanoi government at the end of Operation Homecoming in 1973.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin is even on record as commenting that he believed many of the American POWs who were left behind in Vietnam by the US government wound up in Soviet gulags. Here again, Perot was likely onto something. Again, the elite were trying to stop him from speaking the truth. And it was this moment between himself and Bush that prompted Perot to throw himself into the political fray in 1991.
Trump Going the Way of Perot?
Sadly, Perot’s campaign was never going to make it. Running as a third-party candidate in America has never yielded anything other than defeat for the person running that campaign. A third-party candidacy usually drags voters away from one of the two major parties (Democratic or Republican) and toward the other.
While Ross Perot may have hated Bush, it’s unthinkable to imagine he was sanguine about the neoliberal globalist Bill Clinton. Had it not been for Perot’s presence in the 1992 Presidential Election, though, it is likely that George H.W. Bush would have coasted to reelection and the country would have been much better off.
Perot’s run also did little to help the Working Man and Woman of America, as his campaign had alienated many people who could have proven helpful in furthering his agenda in a potential second Bush term.
Perot’s emotions often got the better of him. In that, he has a deep similarity with Donald J. Trump. As the United States enters its terminal stage of republican governance, with 2024 likely being the last even moderately free election our country will enjoy, Trump is the likely GOP nominee.
Yet, like Perot in 1992, Trump will have a difficult time achieving electoral success because his personality is so divisive and the American people are still not ready to accept his solutions for our most vexing problems.
We have a conundrum. America needs the solutions that a Perot-like candidate can offer. But most Americans will prove unwilling to vote for that candidate—especially Donald Trump because he has been so successfully delegitimized as a candidate by the elite media.
Should the Republicans fail to win in 2024, they will hand the country over to a radical Democratic Party for at least a generation, thereby ensuring America’s reduction as the world’s greatest superpower and its conversion as a vassal in China’s new global empire.
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (May 16), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
