Opinion

Trump Isn’t Hitler. He’s The Love Child Of Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan.

   DailyWire.com

On Sunday, the media went crazy over 2016 Republican frontrunner Donald Trump demanding that his rally-goers raise their right arms and then pledge to vote for him:

The Huffington Post wrote, “The clip mirrored scenes of Hitler addressing crowds in Nazi Germany and performing the Nazi salute – a raised right hand.” Bill Maher aired a fake translation of a Hitler speech to resemble Trump’s language. Louis CK sent out a mass email stating, “the guy is Hitler.”

As I wrote this morning, “Hitler was both intelligent and ideologically-driven. Trump isn’t either. Hitler had an actual fascist philosophy, an actual philosophy of anti-Semitism and racism; Trump is merely personally authoritarian and ego-driven. Trump is a parody strongman, not an actual dictatorial tyrant.”

No, Trump isn’t Hitler.

Trump is a mashup of Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan.

Ross Perot was a military hawk who turned on Ronald Reagan’s presidency after the Iran-Contra affair, and openly opposed the 1991 war with Iraq under George H.W. Bush (unlike Trump, who only opposed the W. Iraq war after it began). Perot declared early in his 1992 campaign that he would self-fund, dumping hundreds of thousands of his own dollars into his campaign. He pushed progressive taxation and promised to balance the budget on the backs of the wealthy. He became the presidential frontrunner, but began to fall apart when his personality began to bleed to the forefront. He had initiated a private investigation of the Bush family in the 1980s, blamed Republican insiders for trying to “destroy” him, referred to blacks as “you people” while speaking with the NAACP, and made his volunteers sign loyalty oaths. Perot dropped out, then later re-entered, preaching, “We got into trickle-down economics and it didn’t trickle,” blaming politicians for gridlock, and complaining about the “giant sucking sound” of jobs moving to Mexico.

Perot ended up winning 19 percent of the popular vote.

Pat Buchanan ran against H.W. Bush in 1992 as well, but stayed in through the primary process. Unlike Perot, who tended toward the socially liberal (he campaigned as pro-choice and pro-gays in the military), Buchanan ran a right-wing social campaign, but focused largely on restricting immigration. And Buchanan had a serious base of support from David Duke’s friends, as The New York Times reported that year: “critics and organizations who follow far-right groups say Mr. Buchanan, who has stolen the conservative thunder from the former Klansman David Duke, has done nothing to repudiate his most extreme admirers or to distance himself from Mr. Duke.” Here’s what Buchanan said about Duke: “What his views are, I don’t really care. I have my own views and I argue from my own vantage point.” Buchanan came in second in New Hampshire, and won 2 million votes nationally in the primaries.

Trump runs on Perot’s economic platform, but without the necessity for paid media – he’s got the media doing his bidding for him. And he’s more a showman than Perot, although Perot was a terrific salesman. Trump runs on Buchanan’s platform, too, but he’s far more popular and likeable than the abrasive and nasty Buchanan, even if he does signal to some of Buchanan’s most vile supporters. There’s a reason the University of Virginia found “there are significant similarities in the support profile of Trump and Perot….Like Trump does now, Buchanan drew disproportionately among Northeastern GOP voters.”

If Buchanan and Perot had been one candidate in 1992, it’s possible they could have taken down a sitting president of their own party. Now Trump is taking down the party itself.

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