Ross Perot – Trump's father

Ross Perot died early Tuesday morning at 89, an event that surely left many Americans with an embarrassed thought: Wait what? … I'm pretty sure I thought he was already dead.

The contrast between Perot's last years of aging and the resounding trumpets of his business and his twentieth-century political career is so striking that it now takes some effort to remember the importance of this Texas Bantam.

History continues below

A little exaggeration is common in obituaries, but it does not take much in the case of Perot. He was a secular prophet who, in his day, had anticipated and personified the disruptive currents of the present.

Whether it's a compliment, of course, depends on what you think of the present. But for people who sometimes react (maybe several times a week) to Trump news while thinking about themselves, I can not believe it's happening, Perot's story is a useful reminder that upsetting politics, a cult of personality, is not an exclusively recent phenomenon.

A quarter of a century before Donald Trump, Perot was an impetuous showman who expressed his disdain for politics and promised voters sharing his disdain that the path to national greatness was to send an autocratic businessman with a touch of jingo The White House will kick ass in Washington.

Perot said insider-initiated insider trading had corrupted Washington and jostled average Americans, and he complained that free trade agreements such as NAFTA were rough deals for the workers and the economy. This message of 1992 is a linear ancestor of the one who echoed to some extent in both parties and who transferred Trump to the presidency in 2016.

He also said that budget deficits of the order of $ 250 billion a year would put the country out of business, a message that seems strange at a time of billions of dollars in deficits that, even once, are no longer particularly agitated by tax hawks.

Unlike Trump, under which the country has the chance to see what would happen by saying to the devil the conventional politicians, Perot saw its importance as a political figure resonate largely because of two hypothetical questions:

And if Perot had not made an independent candidacy that had won 18.9% of the vote in 1992?

There is a good chance that there was never a Clinton presidency there. The question of whether Perot took more votes from Bill Clinton or George H.W. Bush sparked an endless and imponderable post-election analysis among pollsters and political scientists. There is, however, not much doubt among the agents close to the two candidates as to the identity of the beneficiary and the actual effect. Perot, who hated Bush, amplified Clinton's criticism of the GOP incumbent and, at decisive moments, spoke with approval of Clinton and his second, Al Gore. He gave conservative trend inflection voters who did not like Bush a safe alternative to Clinton.

Clinton paid the price of the Perot phenomenon. When the Texan re-introduced in 1996 as the founder of the Reform Party, he never took into account the outcome of the debate but nevertheless obtained 8% of the vote, leaving Clinton to 49%. Although Clinton is sometimes considered the most agile natural politician of modern times, he (unlike George W. Bush or Barack Obama) has never won the support of the majority in a presidential election.

And if Perot had been a little less, uh, erratic?

Idiosyncrasy – or at least the eagerness to break the usual political molds – was part of Perot's charm. The firecrackers and homilies of the outgoing president have, for a moment, entertained even those who did not take his presidential ambitions seriously.

"If you see a snake, kill it, do not name a snake committee." The federal debt looked like "a crazy aunt we keep in the basement." The government's most intractable problems, he promised, could be repaired by letting him go "under the hood" in the same way he had become rich as the founder and CEO of Electronic Data Systems. Part of the Perot mythology – in a story that skeptics later criticized – is the way he deployed a private commando team to rescue two Iranian employees in 1979.

Conspiracy theories have always been part of his call, as has his claim that the first Bush administration suppressed the knowledge of the prisoners of war still alive in Vietnam.

But sometimes, the series of renegades of Perot became simply strange. He surprised people in the summer of 1992 by retiring from the presidential race, thus praising the challenge that Clinton and Gore had presented to the former Bush. Then, in the fall, he again surprised people by jumping in the race. In a bizarre moment, he claimed without justification that Republican agents had attempted to sabotage his daughter's marriage.

Despite what has been widely interpreted as evidence of loosened screws, Perot still captured the allegiance of one in five voters. Although Perot preached self-discipline (strict dress codes and hair codes at his companies) during his political campaigns, he proved himself unable to practice it. If he had and had maintained a consistent message throughout his 1992 campaign, it would be easily conceivable that he could have finished victorious.

In fact, his race clearly revealed the origin of a constituency in national politics, radically disused vis-à-vis major parties and with a persistent sense of American decline – a constituency that has not faded even after that of Perot.