There is a peculiar kind of American theater that plays out whenever a rich person convinces enough people that they are, in fact, one of the little guys, and nowhere has that theater been performed with more success in the last decade than in the cases of Donald Trump and Luigi Mangione. On the surface these two men could not seem further apart, one a seventy-nine-year-old real estate heir turned reality television star turned twice-elected president, the other a twenty-six-year-old Ivy League graduate accused of gunning down a health insurance executive on a Manhattan sidewalk, one beloved by the American right, the other canonized by large swaths of the American left, and yet if you strip away the politics and look only at the mechanics of how each man became a folk hero, you find something almost embarrassingly identical, a shared blueprint of privilege dressed up as rebellion, of media savvy mistaken for authenticity, and of a public so hungry for a symbol that it stopped asking who the symbol actually was.
Start with the backgrounds, because the backgrounds are where the myth first cracks. Donald Trump did not claw his way up from nothing, he was handed a real estate empire by his father, Fred Trump, a man who was himself a millionaire many times over by the time Donald was in grade school, and the “small loan of a million dollars” line, which Trump himself offered up as a joke about his own origin story, has aged into an accidental confession, because a million dollars in the 1970s was not small, and the idea that Trump built his fortune through grit alone has always required people to ignore the inheritance, the lawyers, the bailouts, and the decades of tax strategies that kept the whole operation afloat even through multiple corporate bankruptcies. Luigi Mangione’s background tells a strikingly similar story, minus the decades and the bankruptcies. He grew up in one of the wealthiest families in Maryland, connected to a network of country clubs, private golf courses, and assisted living facilities that his extended family built and still partially owns, he attended the Gilman School, one of the most expensive and exclusive private schools in the country, before going on to the University of Pennsylvania, the same Ivy League institution that gave Trump his own undergraduate degree, and by every available account he had access to money, healthcare, therapy, and opportunity that the vast majority of Americans, including the vast majority of the people who now valorize him, will never see in their lifetimes. Neither man is, by any honest definition, working class. Neither man has ever had to choose between rent and medication. Neither man has ever waited on hold with an insurance company for four hours only to be denied coverage for a procedure a doctor said was necessary. And yet both men have become, in their respective political subcultures, symbols of resistance against exactly that kind of suffering, which should strike anyone paying attention as a strange inversion, a bit like watching two men who have never missed a meal become the public face of a hunger strike.
This is not an accident, and it is not simply a coincidence of biography, it is a function of something both men understand instinctively and deploy with real skill, which is the manipulation of media attention. Trump’s mastery of this is by now a matter of historical record, documented extensively by journalists who covered his rise through the 1980s and 1990s tabloids, where he reportedly called reporters pretending to be his own publicist, feeding them stories about himself under a fake name, inflating his net worth, inventing romantic conquests, and generally treating the press as a tool to be played rather than an institution to be respected or feared. That instinct carried directly into his political career, where every controversy, every outrageous statement, every norm violated became another news cycle, another round of free media coverage that traditional campaigns spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to buy. Trump did not need to win the argument, he needed to dominate the attention, and he understood before almost anyone else in American politics that in a fractured media environment, being talked about constantly is its own form of power, regardless of whether the coverage is favorable. Mangione, in his own case, has become an object of similarly obsessive media fascination, not because he sought it out through decades of tabloid manipulation, but because the imagery of his arrest, the handwritten manifesto, the photogenic mugshot, and the almost cinematic details of the case combined to create a media event that took on a life of its own, one that his defenders and his defense team have both, in different ways, learned to work. Court appearances have become spectacle, supporters show up wearing shirts with his face on them, journalists compete for a limited number of press credentials to cover his trial, and every hearing generates headlines that keep his name circulating in a culture that has, whether intentionally or not, turned a murder trial into a folk narrative. Both men, in other words, figured out that the story does not have to be true or flattering to be useful, it only has to be sticky, and both have benefited enormously from audiences who consume the myth without checking it against the biography.
The outsider framing is perhaps the most durable and the most dishonest part of both mythologies. Trump ran in 2016 as the ultimate outsider, a man who supposedly could not be bought because he was already rich, a self-styled disruptor of a corrupt Washington establishment, even though he had spent decades cultivating relationships with politicians in both parties, donating to campaigns across the aisle, and operating comfortably within the exact system of favors and access he claimed to be running against. His billionaire status was reframed, almost magically, from evidence of establishment membership into proof of independence, the logic being that because he did not need anyone’s money he could not be controlled by anyone, a claim that conveniently ignored the fact that inherited wealth is its own form of establishment power, arguably the oldest form there is. Mangione’s supporters have constructed something remarkably parallel, casting him as a lone crusader against a healthcare industry that has genuinely and demonstrably harmed millions of Americans, a young man radicalized by chronic pain and by watching insurance companies deny and delay care, someone who supposedly stepped outside his privilege to strike a blow on behalf of people who have no other recourse. There is a real and legitimate anger underneath that narrative, an anger about a healthcare system that does ration care, that does deny claims that cost people their savings and sometimes their lives, and that anger deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms. But the specific decision to route that anger through Luigi Mangione, to make him the face and symbol of it, requires ignoring who he actually is, a man with the financial and social resources to access nearly any medical treatment, any specialist, any surgery he might have needed, resources that the people supposedly being avenged do not have. Calling him an outsider to the system he attacked is a bit like calling a man who owns three houses an outsider to real estate. He was never outside it. He was simply, for reasons that remain his own, willing to act violently against a piece of it.
Then there is the matter of consequence, or the striking absence of it, which is where the comparison sharpens into something closer to a direct echo. In January 2016, campaigning in Sioux Center, Iowa, Trump told a crowd that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and he would not lose voters, a line that was widely reported at the time as a boast about the near-cultic loyalty of his base, and one that turned out, over the following years, to be less an exaggeration than a fairly accurate prediction. Multiple controversies that would have ended the career of almost any other American politician, remarks about immigrants, about women, about judges, about the outcome of the 2020 election, criminal indictments, a felony conviction, none of it meaningfully dented his support among the coalition that had already decided he was theirs, and in fact each new controversy often seemed to deepen the loyalty rather than erode it, as supporters came to view every attack on him as further proof that the system itself was the enemy, not him. Luigi Mangione’s case offers an almost eerie mirror of that same dynamic, except instead of a hypothetical shooting on Fifth Avenue, it is an actual shooting on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk that he stands accused of carrying out, and instead of losing support in the aftermath, he gained it, rapidly and visibly, with crowdfunded legal defense accounts, fan art, merchandise, dating profiles referencing him approvingly, and a wave of online commentary treating him less like a criminal defendant facing the death penalty and more like a folk hero out of an old ballad. Whatever one believes about the moral weight of what he is accused of doing, the sociological pattern is the same pattern Trump described and then lived out for a decade, which is that for a large enough audience, identity and grievance can matter more than the specific facts of the act, and a sufficiently compelling symbol can survive almost anything, including violence, including scandal, including behavior that would sink an ordinary person instantly and permanently.
What both cases reveal, if you are willing to look past the partisan packaging, is something uncomfortable about how modern political tribes actually work, which is that they are far more interested in symbols than in substance, and far more willing to overlook inconvenient facts about a person’s background, wealth, and character if that person appears to be striking a blow against the tribe’s designated enemy. For Trump’s supporters, the enemy was a caricature of liberal elites, and so his own billionaire status was rebranded as proof he could not be bought by them. For Mangione’s supporters, the enemy is the healthcare industry, and so his own extraordinary privilege gets waved away because he supposedly acted against a system that harms ordinary people, even though he is about as far from ordinary as a person in this country can be. In both cases, a genuinely rich, genuinely insulated person gets recast, through a kind of collective act of narrative editing, as a stand-in for the very people whose material reality they have never had to live. Trump has never worried about paying rent. Mangione has never had to ration insulin. Both men, though, get treated by their respective admirers as though they emerged from and speak for people in exactly those situations, which flatters the admirers as much as it flatters the men themselves, because believing that your champion is one of the people lets you believe that the movement is organic, grassroots, and morally uncomplicated, rather than being, in both cases, substantially a product of media spectacle amplifying the actions of people who were never outsiders to begin with.
None of this is to say the two men or their situations are identical in every respect, because they plainly are not, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. Trump has held the most powerful elected office on earth, twice, through a functioning democratic process, and his actions as a politician and now returning president have shaped policy, law, and the lives of hundreds of millions of people in ways that are measurable and ongoing. Mangione is a criminal defendant awaiting trial on state and federal charges, including charges that could carry the death penalty, and he has pleaded not guilty to all of them, which means that, whatever the court of public opinion has already decided, the legal question of what he did and why remains formally unresolved. Their politics point in opposite directions, one toward a nationalist and market-friendly right, the other toward a strain of the online left that is furious at corporate power in healthcare specifically. Anyone who wanted to push back on this comparison could reasonably say that stacking a twice-elected president against a twenty-six-year-old facing a capital murder trial flattens two very different scales of consequence into a false equivalence, and that critique has real force, because holding executive power over a nation is not the same as being accused of a single violent act, however notorious. But the comparison being drawn here is not about the scale of their power or the legality of their actions, it is about the shape of the mythology built around them, the way both men were sold to their respective audiences as authentic outsiders when the underlying biography says otherwise, and the way both audiences proved willing to forgive, excuse, or simply stop caring about behavior that would be disqualifying for almost anyone else, because the symbol had already become more important than the man.
The uncomfortable conclusion, for people on either side of the political spectrum who have found themselves cheering for one of these two men, is that the cheering may say less about justice or class solidarity than it does about the enduring appeal of a good story, told well, by someone with the resources and the media fluency to tell it. Both Trump and Mangione benefited from being interesting, from being photogenic, from generating headlines, from having supporters who wanted so badly to believe in an outsider fighting the machine that they were willing to overlook the country clubs, the private schools, the safety nets, and the inherited advantages sitting quietly underneath the myth. A working-class hero, in the actual, literal sense of that phrase, would be someone who has lived the deprivation they claim to be fighting against, not someone who was educated at an elite institution and cushioned by generational wealth the entire time. Calling Luigi Mangione the left’s version of Donald Trump is not an insult to either man’s politics, it is an observation about the mechanism by which both became famous, which is the oldest trick in American public life, the trick of letting a rich man play the part of the common man so convincingly that the audience forgets to check his résumé. The tragedy, if there is one, is not that people wanted heroes, it is that so many were willing to accept a costume for the real thing, and cheered just as loudly either way.