Did Ross Perot give us Donald Trump? His anti-free trade 1992 campaign certainly gave us the blueprint

Perot was the original quotable outsider businessman to become a presidential front-runner through free trade scepticism

His strange 1992 campaign may also have given us Bill Clinton’s presidency, setting the wheels in motion for Trump’s rise

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Texas billionaire Ross Perot, who died on July 9 at age 89, captivated the American public with a presidential campaign that used many of the same themes Donald Trump would later employ. Photo: AP

Robert Boxwell has worked and lived in the Asia-Pacific region since the early 1990s.

Published: 3:00am, 13 Jul 2019Updated: 3:07am, 13 Jul 2019

Ross Perot passed away this week at 89. He was a real billionaire in the late 1980s, before billionaires were a dime a dozen, or lying about it. My roommate at the time, a good friend, worked for Steve Jobs at NeXT Inc, and would come home from time to time with a Perot story. Perot, the first outside investor in NeXT, was on the company’s board of directors and wasn’t shy about telling Jobs or anyone else there about how they were screwing up. He was one of those few people for whom Jobs would wear a tie.

One day NeXT’s head of sales came up to my friend after receiving a phone call from Perot. Like Perot, he had been a star IBM salesman, and he idolised the older man. My quotes aren’t exact, but close enough. “I have a new definition for ‘mixed emotions’,” he began, riffing on a common joke genre of the day. “Ross just called me. He’s never done that before. I was elated.” Then the punchline: “He spent a half hour telling me I’m doing a s****y job.”

It wasn’t the sales guy’s fault. Perot and other high-profile industry experts, who were part of a NeXT advisory board Jobs had formed to tap their expertise, had told Jobs clearly what guts and features to put in NeXT’s iconic cube-shaped computers, and how to price them. Jobs largely ignored them. Perot resigned in 1991, and NeXT was soon out of business.