Bias is a word that my professors beat out of my vocabulary at University for one very simple reason. It seldom has any effective content. To say something is ‘biased’ is essentially saying it was written by a human. Everything is ‘biased’, always and unavoidably. Therefore i won’t say i try and be ‘un-biased’ when i write here. What i do try to be is non-partisan.

It will come as no surprise to most of you that i am no fan of Trump, or Conservative politics in general. The title of this blog should make that obvious. But i’m also not interested in using this space to advocate for a particular policy or agenda. I say all this so you will understand that what follows is not intended as a defense of Trump, but an attempt to put his place in American political history in its proper context.

The way people around the world are reacting to the metamorphosis of The Donald from reality-show host to Presidential aspirant suggests he is an aberration in the history of American politics. But this is sadly untrue. Trump is just not that weird by historical standards, and in hindsight we should have all been less surprised by his rise.

To demonstrate the many parallels between Trump and previous candidates, and between the current national mood and popular feeling at other points in American history, i’m going to do a series of posts on previous presidential candidates with trump-like characteristics. Because Trump is not the disease affecting American political discourse, he is just the virulent rash it is currently breaking out in. This cycle has already happened. We have played this game before. And although some of the pieces were in different places, the moves made with them were really the same. And so, without further ado, i give you Henry Ross Perot.

H. Ross Perot, Reform Party. Ran 1992 and 1996.

The first thing to know about Perot is that people who called him Henry didn’t get on the Christmas card list. He hated it. So Ross it is.

In 1992 the country was in a funk. The United States experienced a recession in the previous year, the deficit was growing and unemployment peaked at 7.8%. People all over the country felt like the place was on the wrong track. The government did not seem to be serving their needs. They felt Washington was dominated by special interests whose only preoccupation was enriching themselves and elites who didn’t understand their struggles or share their concerns.

Republicans and Democrats couldn’t agree on a deficit reduction plan. Political gridlock reigned. The sitting president, George H. W. Bush, seemed a distant and ascetic figure more concerned with technocratic minutiae than the plight of the common man. The ‘establishment’ had sold out the citizenry, the professional politicians participating in a revolving door system that just returned the same people spouting the same soundbytes. There was a hunger for authenticity, for plain speaking and for someone to actually solve the nations multitudinous problems rather than just talking about them and blaming the other guy. If this sounds like what people are saying in 2016, well done. You are getting the point.

Enter Ross Perot. A short man who spoke with a distinctive Texan drawl, Perot was a self-made billionaire. With his military-style haircut, (short back and sides, no Trump Pelt  nonsense here), piercing eyes and direct speaking style he seemed the antithesis of the Washington insider.

But its the message that makes him similar to Trump. He didn’t have any experience in Government. But that was a good thing. Government was the problem. Government had wasted your money. Government was inefficient, incompetent, corrupt and vaguely un-masculine. While the Washington big-shots quibbled over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, Perot had been out there making jobs, making money and making deals. This is what he promised to bring to the Presidency. He would do in government what he had done in business, fix things and not ‘spend 10 years solving a 10 minute problem’. His experience outside of government qualified him because government had failed the people, because their institutions were no longer serving the citizens. Screw politics, Perot said, i know how to get results. I got them in business, and i can get them for you if you just elect me.

It is, fundamentally, the same pitch Trump is making. That is not a coincidence.  When confidence in the system is low, those from outside the system have an advantage. Usually its people successful in business or the military that step in to fill the gap. It is not terribly mysterious.

Perot cut through the traditional formulations of the binary political system. The problems of the nation weren’t complex and intractable. The politicians were just incompetent. The system was broken, said Brother Ross, and he was the cure.

Like an Olympian Colossus he would bestride the political divide and hurl thunderbolts of organisational and   administrative genius at the Titans endangering good governance. He would balance the budget before breakfast, rewrite crooked trade agreements that hurt American workers and businesses over lunch and then have the inner cities cleaned up before tea time.

The deficit. Unfair trade deals. Law and order. Sound familiar? It should. It is Trumpism writ large.

But in fairness to H. Ross and his crusade, he did have one big advantage in my eyes over trump. He tried to explain things, and persuade you that he had the solution. He booked a half-hour long infomercial in prime time, replete with graphs and figures and him calmly explaining how he would fix the deficit and have money left over for things people wanted. Trump would not be seen dead in such a capacity. His solutions are for him to know and you to find out. Explaining it would only give the game away to the Chinese, or the Mexicans or whoever the bogeyman de jour is.

Another difference is that Perot essentially constructed his own party. And that isn’t as crazy an idea as it sounds for someone like him. He was polling incredibly well for a while, looking like he might push Clinton into third place.

Although it eventually came to little, the problem with the Perot campaign was not the message. It was Ross’ perpetual micromanaging, his reluctance to commit enough money to the campaign to make it truly competitive and his bizarre behavior that doomed it. He thought the CIA was spying on him, thought the Bush campaign had used the CIA and FBI in some sort of foul play involving his daughters wedding, that someone had broken in and tampered with his automatic stock trading program to try and ruin him and a host of other strange and paranoid theories. He was, in other words, a bit of an odd duck.

But the message resonated. It took a diminutive Texas businessman with a good helping of paranoia and made him both a household name and a serious presidential contender for a while. With that in mind, is it really so hard to imagine that a plurality of Republican primary voters might be persuaded by a similar message two decades later?

Trump isn’t new. He is old. He is a very well aged wine poured into a new bottle. Admittedly this bottle has some particularly baroque edges, an objectionable shape and infuses the wine with a bitter and sickening aftertaste. But its not an innovation. It is merely a variation on a theme. The Republic has survived worse than Donald J. Trump, and it will endure long after he has gone back to his habitual private pursuits: filing for bankruptcy, defrauding consumers and decorating his buildings like a deranged magpie.