Ross Perot and President Trump shared many things, mainly an anti-establishment political philosophy. Many in the media are talking up this bond, but it was actually closer than most remember.
Most forget that Trump almost ran, in 2000, on Perot’s Reform ticket as a third party candidate.
Trump did not, but used that experience to inform his run in 2016 – he decided a third party was not an option so overthrow the establishment of both parties the hard way – from within.
So it is not surprising that one of Perot’s last political act was to donate to Trump. From Fox News:
In his last documented political act, self-made billionaire and two-time presidential candidate Ross Perot wrote out two checks to President Trump’s re-election campaign before succumbing to his battle with leukemia at the age of 89, according to a report.
Perot, who ran for president as a third-party candidate in 1992 and 1996, is largely credited with providing a road map for Trump’s presidential campaign.
Like Trump, Perot ran as a billionaire populist against the Republican establishment. His focus on the North American Free Trade Agreement – rather than the national debt – and his use of cable news for laying out his agenda were both familiar elements of Trump’s campaign.
As Democratic strategist James Carville put it in a 2016 podcast: “If Donald Trump is the Jesus of the disenchanted, displaced non-college white voter, then Perot was the John the Baptist of that sort of movement.”
In March, Perot wrote two checks of the maximum legal limit to Trump’s re-election campaign, including next year’s general election, the Boston Globe reported.
