America's new John Dillinger

It’s a time of extremes.

Our national media is reporting that CEOs across the nation are doubling up on security in the wake of Brian Thompson’s assassination. Outside of the healthcare industry, though, they probably don’t need to bother.

Luigi Mangione and Donald Trump are both revolutionaries trying to change the essential nature of the system. Both have employed violence, both have caused people to die through their revolutionary efforts (Mangione one CEO, Trump three cops and five civilians). Both are proclaimed heroes by many of the people who want the same changes they want.

But that’s where the similarities end.

Throughout the 1920s, three consecutive Republican administrations (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover) cut taxes from a high of 91 percent down to 25 percent, shifted government away from supporting the average person (reversing efforts of Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft and, arguably, Woodrow Wilson) to hustling for the morbidly rich. All three Republican presidents took steps to progressively deregulate our financial system.

It all came to a head in October 1929 when GOP deregulation caused banks to fail across the nation, kicking off what the next two generations called the Republican Great Depression.

My mother’s family had owned substantial property in Charlevoix, Michigan during that era, but was wiped out in the Great Crash when the bank they used failed. They had to sell everything, my mom’s father died of a heart attack from the stress, and she grew up in near-poverty. She — and most people of her generation — distrusted the banks and hated the banksters who’d immiserated them.

As a result of the crimes of the banks, that era had its own versions of Robin Hood, and they were the bank robbers.

Americans followed with bated breath the robberies, murders, and police pursuits of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Bonny and Clyde, and Ma Barker’s Barker-Karpis Gang, among others. They were that generation’s heroic anti-heroes, the ones who were “making the evil banksters pay” with both money and blood.

The public was fascinated. Bank robbers filled the newspapers, magazines, and radio. Books were written about them and, later, movies made about them. Many hero-worshiped them.

That was then and this is now.

The Republican Great Depression forced reforms to banking that are with us to this day (although George W. Bush undid some of them, resulting in the Great Theft that triggered the Bush Crash of 2008). While we still are generally wary of banks, they’re not Public Enemy Number One in the public’s mind anymore.

Instead, today there’s barely an American family that doesn’t have a horror story of being denied essential healthcare because a giant insurance company refused to pay a claim or authorize a procedure, test, or medication.

It’s not an exaggeration to point out that Americans’ hatred of health insurance executives today is right up there with my mother’s generation’s hatred of bankers in the 1930s.

Which explains why Luigi Mangione is now a folk hero: He’s the John Dillinger of this generation.

Donald Trump campaigned as a similar type of bad-boy folk hero.

He’s the guy who was going to take down the Black people, Hispanics, and women who white Republicans believe have gained their positions by virtue of their skin color or gender rather than their competence. He’ll give white men their mojo back by destroying Brown peoples’ lives and tearing families apart. He’s going to cut our taxes and “drain the swamp.” He’s going to “protect” our kids from liberals and queer people.

Americans, after all, know they’ve been screwed. Forty-three years of Reaganism has gutted the middle class, as I lay out in my new book The Hidden History of the American Dream.

Whether they know the details or not, working class people intuit that houses cost twice the average annual income in the 1960s but cost ten times the average annual income today. Boomers controlled over 21 percent of the nation’s wealth when we were in our 30s, but today’s generation in their 30s only control 4.6 percent of the nation’s wealth. One paycheck was the price of entry to the middle class 43 years ago; today it takes two or more.

What the people who support Trump don’t realize, though, is that it was Trump’s own Party and his own class of extremely wealthy people who did this to them. And who are now gaslighting them. A Harris poll a few months ago found how badly Trump followers are misinformed:

— Fully 55 percent of Americans thought the economy was shrinking, although it’d been steadily growing throughout Biden’s four years in office.
— Half (49%) thought the stock market was down, when it was hitting all-time highs, up 24 percent in 2023 and over 12 percent in 2024.
— The same percentage believed that unemployment was at a 50-year high, even though it was below 4 percent, a 50-year low.
— An amazing 72 percent of Americans believed inflation was increasing when, in fact, it had collapsed from over 9 percent to less than 3 percent.
— As a result of these false beliefs, fully 56 percent of voters thought America was in a recession on election day when, in fact, the economy was doing better than any time in the past 50 years.

People who consumed billionaire-owned right wing media or got their news from billionaire-owned social media were actually less well-informed than people who claimed to follow no news at all.

It’s a true testament to the gaslighting power of billionaire Murdoch’s Fox “News,” billionaire-owned social media, and billionaire-owned rightwing hate radio: they succeeded in convincing virtually the entire Republican base that up was down. Along with a lot of help from the richest man in the world and his purchase of the world’s largest social media platform, which he turned into a sewer of grievance, hate, and lies.

It’s what happens when a man like Musk spends a quarter-billion dollars on deceitful television and other advertising media.

And, tragically, it’s also an example of the failure of the Biden administration and congressional Democratic leadership (and the DNC) to simply and daily promote their own successes over the four years of his presidency.

What’s most relevant here is that Luigi Mangione identified a real villain: a parasitic, greedy, and psychopathic health insurance industry that does not exist as it does here in any other developed country in the world.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, promised to fix a middle class that’s been broken by 40 years of Reaganomics’ austerity and low taxes on the rich…with more austerity and low taxes on the rich.

Which is going to present a real challenge for Trump when he takes over.

He’ll continue to claim he’s fighting for the little guy as he cuts taxes on billionaires, guts Social Security, makes college and healthcare more expensive, increases pollution, and throws the nation into a recession with his deportations and tariffs.

He’s already trying to position himself as his own version of Luigi Mangione, a “giant killer” who’ll take on a corrupted system even at the peril of his own life.

But reality can be problematic.

Convincing people that Trump’s efforts are working once he’s back in office is going to be a much bigger lift for rightwing media. They’ll try, of course — throughout his last administration Trump and rightwing media repeatedly proclaimed the “best economy in American history” when, in fact, he never even got to Obama’s or Biden’s economic numbers.

The simple reality is that while Trump is a revolutionary, he’s promoting a revolution that will exclusively benefit the corrupt and the morbidly rich. He’ll make things worse for average people, just like he did last time; just like George W. Bush did, and Ronald Reagan did.

All three had severe recessions, each kicked off by tax cuts, just like Reagan’s recession after his tax cuts. Clinton, Obama, and Biden — eschewing tax cuts and instead raising taxes on the rich — never had a recession.

But Donald Trump will go big on shoveling government money to billionaires and thus bring our economy to its knees.

Then, and really only then, should CEOs across multiple industries begin to worry as unemployment and inflation both explode while billionaires and massive monopolies make off with another $7 trillion like during his last administration.

Until that time, the only CEOs who really have a legitimate reason, based on current public opinion, to look over their shoulders are in the health insurance industry.