SocraticGadfly: Donald Trump = Ross Perot (or Silvio Berlusconi) on steroids and other drugs

November 17, 2016

Donald Trump = Ross Perot (or Silvio Berlusconi) on steroids and other drugs

Nearly two months ago, well in advance of the US presidential election, I blogged that I was not THAT afraid of a President Trump.

I still stand by that.

Since then, and also starting before the election, the idea began percolating in my head that Donald Trump is a riff on Ross Perot. Both are somewhat dictatorial-minded, in their management styles, big business CEOs.

Ross Perot would have been in for a rude awakening had he been elected president, and I think Donald Trump faces some of the same, even though the GOP controls both houses of Congress.



Trump is basically a more bloviating, more mercurial, cruder and more thuggish version of Ross Perot. (Of course, this assumes that the stream-of-consciousness exemplifier can be categorized at all.)

And, the punditocracy class and MSM analysts are asleep at the wheel to have not started drawing Trump-Perot parallels. (He is NOT, contra MSM pre-election bloviating, a fascist.)

If one goes back to 1992, one will (without the overwrought psychology) hear Perot make many of the same statements, such as “I’m going to abolish X,” without noting the existence of this thing called the US Congress.

Indeed, Mitch the Turtle is already saying no to some of Trump's ideas.

Maybe, in a riff on a certain South American country’s past political history, we should talk about “Perotism”?

As a psychological case study, I think a President Trump is going to be fun to watch for frustration levels, and the mercurialness I mentioned. (I think he is clinically diagnosable with mercurial personality disorder. Relax, folks, it’s just a neurosis, not a psychosis, and not the worst one in the book.)

Would he resign? I don’t know.

I do know that, if he did, a President Pence would likely be FAR more scary than a President Trump.

Ergo, Clintonistas, other Dems, and left liberals should NOT hope Allen Lichtman will be right (he won't) that a GOP Congress will impeach Trump.

The Times, in an opinion piece, has advice on how to treat Trump, and not treat him, based on the Italian left's handling of Berlusconi. And, Berlusconi is certainly a closer parallel than Ross Perot!


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