Article snippet: The first paragraph of H. Ross Perot’s obituary was written decades before his death: He’s a self-made billionaire who became the most successful third-party presidential candidate in nearly a century. But the legacy of Perot, who died Tuesday at 89 years old, extends well beyond what he did in the 1990s. Perot not only showed Trump how to run as a populist for president but also how to use cable news to build a brand, frame a nationalist agenda around opposing free trade, and, yes, how to use Mexico as a political foil. Politics is a process. There would be no LBJ without FDR. There wouldn’t be a Reagan revolution without Barry Goldwater. And it’s possible there wouldn’t be a Trump presidency without Perot. “If Donald Trump is the kind of Jesus of the disenchanted, displaced non-college white voter, then Perot was the John the Baptist of that sort of movement,” Democratic strategist James Carville said in a 2016 podcast. In the 1992 campaign, Perot exposed and exploited the rift inside the Republican Party between establishment leaders and a more fervent base. To many in the GOP, President George H.W. Bush was the symbol for a Republican Party of the past — out of tune with the rising religious right, broken promises like supporting new taxes, and supportive of Wall Street in free trade deals. At first, Pat Buchanan ran against all of that in the Republican primaries of 1992. But when it became clear Buchanan would not win, Perot announced in February that he w... Link to the full article to read more