Loading ...Ross Perot was Trumpy, years before Trump
Twenty-five years before President Donald Trump took office promising to roll back trade deals, H. Ross Perot told a national audience that the “giant sucking sound” voters heard was American jobs flowing to Mexico.
Perot, who died on July 9, at 89 after a 5-month battle with leukemia, was a billionaire businessman who sprang to fame as an independent presidential candidate in 1992, when he won 19% of the popular vote. That still stands as the best showing for a third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. Perot launched his campaign on Feb. 29, 1992, when he told CNN interviewer Larry King that he’d run for president if supporters got him on the ballot in all 50 states. They did.
Perot used charts, graphs and 30-minute infomercials to expound on his two pet topics: opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was about to go into effect, and the national debt, which was mushrooming even back then. “The debt is like a crazy aunt we keep down in the basement,” Perot said during the campaign. “All the neighbors know she’s there, but nobody wants to talk about her.” He spent $72 million of his own money – $129 million today — financing his campaign, and his bluntness, Texas twang and folksy weirdness won him a cult following. Dana Carvey portrayed him on “Saturday Night Live.”