One evening in the fall of 2015, with the unlikely Donald J. Trump already dominating the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, I ran into Ross Perot, Jr., at an exclusive charity event in Dallas. Perot is a billionaire real estate developer and the only son of H. Ross Perot, who campaigned for president as an independent in 1992 and as a third-party candidate in 1996.

After exchanging pleasantries, I asked Perot whether he didn’t see some parallels, as I did, in the maverick presidential quests of Trump and his father. “Absolutely not,” he shot back. Moreover, he seemed offended by the suggestion.

While a number of Dallas Republicans were dismissing Trump at the time as a political pretender and an uncouth street brawler, I was surprised by Perot’s reaction. And, I thought he was wrong. The fact is that Trump and Perot’s father, who died of leukemia in July at the age of 89, were both brilliant, straight-talking billionaire-businessmen whose outsider views were unconventional and underestimated. Each was a master salesman with a swashbuckling, cut-to-the-chase style. And each used similar tactics in pursuit of populist, anti-establishment goals on behalf of the “forgotten” Americans.

I think the country is better off because they did.

In a 2016 podcast, James Carville, the political commentator who managed Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, succinctly connected Trump and Perot. “If Donald Trump is the kind of Jesus of the disenchanted, displaced non-college white voter,” Carville said, “then Perot was the John the Baptist of that sort of movement.”

To be sure, comparing Perot (who stood 5-feet-6-inches tall) with Trump (6-feet-3) is to make an odd couple. They were born 16 years and 1,200 miles apart—Perot in 1930 in Texarkana, Texas, Trump in 1946 in Queens, New York. Both had strong fathers who made lasting impressions on their sons. As a teenager, Perot changed his middle name from Ray to Ross to honor his father, Gabriel Ross Perot. The elder Perot was a business-savvy cotton broker, who had his son breaking horses at the age of six. Trump’s father was the hard-charging New York real estate developer Fred Trump, who founded the family’s property business. Trump wrote in his book Think Like a Billionaire that his father was “the greatest man I’ve ever known, and the biggest influence on my life.…He had absolutely no doubt about my ability.”

Owing perhaps to the example of these influences, both Perot and Trump would involve their own children in their companies. After Perot served in the U.S. Navy, he worked as a salesman for IBM, which led to his becoming a pioneer in the computer-services industry through the founding in 1962 of Electronic Data Systems, which he sold to General Motors in 1984 for $2.4 billion. Perot used his fortune to support Apple founder Steve Jobs’ post-Apple company, NeXT, and started a second computer-services company called Perot Systems Corp. There, Ross Jr. served as chief executive and then chairman of the board until the company was acquired by Dell in 2009 for $3.9 billion.

At The Trump Organization, a real-estate development, investment, and management firm that Donald Trump ran from the 1970s until winning the U.S. presidency, Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric and his daughter Ivanka played key roles. “Friends are good,” Donald Trump wrote, “but family is better.”

Both Perot and Trump ran their companies frugally, understood the value of intrepid salesmanship, and appreciated the importance of listening. “Without straightforward feedback, entrepreneurs cannot make sound decisions,” Trump wrote in his book Midas Touch. Perot agreed. “The way to make a company successful is to listen, listen, listen to your customers; most companies don’t,” he told me in a 2002 interview. “And listen, listen, listen to the people on the front lines working directly with your customers.”

Perot favored considered action over prolonged deliberation. In the ’02 interview he explained: “We teach everybody from Day One, and this is plain Texas talk that offends a lot of people: ‘If you see a snake, kill it. Don’t form a committee on snakes. Just do it!’”

Speaking candidly and identifying problems early on were hallmarks of both men as they entered the political arena, too. While neither was a doctrinaire conservative, they appealed to the silent, non-partisan majority—traditionally minded citizens who’d been “left behind” by the big-spending, free-trading, internationalist policies of both major parties. Perot led the way in 1992, when he ran against Republican President George H.W. Bush, who was seeking reelection, and Clinton, the Arkansas governor and Democratic standard-bearer.

Long before Trump introduced his “America First” message, Perot during the ’92 campaign sharply criticized the offshoring of U.S. jobs, the country’s ballooning trade deficit, and the outsized influence of foreign lobbyists in Washington, D.C. In a speech at the National Press Club, Perot said the nation’s capital—which Trump would later call “The Swamp”—had become “a town with sound bites, shell games, handlers, media stuntmen who posture, create images, talk, shoot off Roman candles, but don’t ever accomplish anything. We need deeds, not words, in this city.” It was necessary, he would later add, to “take out the trash and clean out the barn.”

Perot was especially critical of the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement, which was aimed at removing or lessening trade barriers between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. NAFTA, its proponents claimed, would enhance commerce and even help reduce illegal immigration to the U.S. But in the candidates’ third televised debate, Perot declared, “You implement NAFTA, the Mexican trade agreement, where they pay a dollar an hour, have no health care, no retirement, no pollution controls, etc., and you’re going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country. We don’t have good trade agreements across the world.” On another occasion he was even more blunt: “[W]e do the world’s dumbest trade agreements. You go back to the agreements we’ve done all over the world, you’d be amazed that adults did them.” Today’s readers can be forgiven for confusing those statements with Trump’s tweets.

Despite Perot’s arguments, Clinton signed NAFTA into law in 1993. As a result of the pact, studies have shown hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs were lost or displaced over the years. A $1.7 billion surplus in trade goods with Mexico in 1993 became a $80.7 billion deficit by 2018, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. And, some have argued, the agreement did not ease but exacerbated the problem of illegal immigration, which would become the signature issue of Trump’s successful 2016 presidential run against Democrat Hillary Clinton. President Trump, who was also a longtime NAFTA critic, renegotiated that agreement last year on terms more favorable to the U.S.—though only slightly. He has also imposed stiff tariffs on unfair trading partners like China, and abandoned ill-considered treaties and pacts including the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Iran nuclear deal.

Similarly, both Perot and Trump railed during their campaigns against America’s involvement in wars of choice—the Texan opposed the 1991 Gulf War—even as they stressed their unflagging support for the men and women in uniform. Both also urged U.S. allies to pony up more for their own defense. “We spend $300 billion a year defending the world,” Perot said during the ‘92 debate. “Germany and Japan spend about $30 billion apiece.” His comments foreshadowed Trump’s successful effort, years later, to persuade NATO nations to boost their defense contributions.

In addition, both presidential candidates decried the U.S. budget deficit and debt, though Perot was much stronger in his criticism. The deficit and debt—in 1992 they were less than $300 billion and $4 trillion, respectively—were like “a crazy aunt you keep down in the basement,” Perot said. “All the neighbors know she’s there, but nobody talks about her.” While Perot proposed higher taxes and lower spending as a solution to the problem, candidate Trump vowed to eliminate the debt in eight years by cutting government waste and growing the economy. Unfortunately, that’s been an empty promise so far. The national debt currently totals $22.6 trillion, and the 2019 budget deficit is expected to top $1 trillion. In July, however, Trump reportedly pledged to impose massive budget cuts if he wins a second term.

Though Perot in recent years rarely gave interviews on political matters, it was obvious when I spoke with him in 2009 that he remained troubled by the annual deficit, which at that time was $1.4 trillion. Did he have any hope, I asked, that it might come down soon? “Not right now, because they’re printing money right and left,” he replied. “I thought our numbers were bad in 1992, but the ones today are making [those] numbers look good.” With that he took a crisp piece of faux currency out of his wallet and held it up, grinning. The imitation bill had President Barack Obama’s portrait in the middle, along with the inscription “One Trillion Dollars.”

In his approach to the media, Trump’s strategy also resembles Perot’s. Much as Trump—first as a candidate, then as president—has pioneered the use of Twitter, bypassing traditional media to share his thoughts directly with tens of millions of followers, Perot marshaled the burgeoning power of cable TV. He announced his 1992 candidacy on CNN’s Larry King Live and, during the campaign, appeared in a series of prime-time TV infomercials, using simple charts and graphs to explain issues like the national debt. And, just as Trump would be vilified years later, Perot was attacked by the media elite as a dangerous fascist. Writers for The New Yorker and the Village Voice, for example, compared him to Mussolini and Hitler.

Despite such criticisms, and the great obstacles facing any independent candidacy, Perot resonated with the public, at least for a while. In June of 1992, the Gallup Poll showed him leading the presidential race with 39 percent of the vote, to Bush’s 31 percent and Clinton’s 25 percent. But then in July, for reasons that remain mysterious, he dropped out of the fray—only to re-enter in October. On Election Day, Perot wound up with 19 percent of the vote, the most for any non-major-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Four years later, he garnered 8.4 percent running under the banner of the Reform Party, which he’d founded in 1995 as an outgrowth of his ’92 campaign. In 2000, Trump too flirted with a presidential run on the Reform ticket, only to decide against it in the end.

Of course, Perot and Trump differed in many ways as well. The former was buttoned-up and precise, a former Eagle Scout, and a devoted husband of 63 years with straight-arrow ethics. Trump, a lifelong Lothario who’s been married three times, is renowned—or notorious—for his “truthful hyperbole.” Perhaps their biggest divergence, though, was tactical. Trump realized that a third-party presidential bid was unlikely to succeed in 2016, given Perot’s experience and the tenor of the times. So, he decided the wiser course would be to stage a “hostile takeover” of the Republican Party from within. He also proved to be a much better natural politician than Perot. Indeed, in a Fox News interview in July, Ed Rollins, who briefly co-managed Perot’s race in 1992, recalled that Perot “did not understand politics” at all. There’s little doubt, though, that Perot and Trump were cut from the same political cloth. And, there might have never been a Trump presidency if the diminutive Texan hadn’t paved the way. “Mr. Trump was possible because he had the wisdom to tap into what Mr. Perot touched on in 1992,” Orson Swindle, a top spokesman for Perot’s first campaign, told the Washington Examiner.

Perhaps even Ross Perot, Jr., has come to recognize this. Federal Election Commission forms showed that in March the younger Perot gave two $2,800 checks to Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, the maximum amount allowed by law.

[Image: AP Photo/Rick Bowmer]