The Great American Heist: How Reagan, Trump, and Their Billionaire Backers Stole the Middle Class

A 50-year project to turn the world’s strongest democracy into a playground for the rich...

It’s election day in much of America, although the biggest races are in California, Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maine, and New York City. As a bellwether for next year’s midterms that could define the fate and future of Trumpism, the stakes are enormous, and are bleeding through into social media.

One of the most viral Facebook posts yesterday was from a MAGA mom complaining that her Democratic mother-in-law won’t loan her grocery money. She explains that she can’t feed her family because Trump’s government shutdown has frozen her SNAP (Food Stamps) and WIC benefits, and, she wrote:

“He asked his mother to buy a can [of baby formula] until our WIC comes in. Her response was, ‘We voted for this.’”

The largest percentage of comments were variations on, “That’s what you wanted when you voted for that orange asshole, but you must have thought he’d only do it to Black and Hispanic people. FAFO!”

Along those same lines, Trump went on 60 Minutes this weekend and lied to Norah O’Donnell’s face multiple times, including a whopper about grocery prices when she pointed out that they’re going up, up, and up.

“No, you’re wrong.” Trump lied with his best “sincere” expression. “They went up under Biden, right now they’re going down. Other than beef, which we’re working on.”

Yeah, tell us about it, Donny. Just like climate change is a hoax, cutting taxes on billionaires helps working people, and you and your sons taking billions in crypto money from foreigners isn’t corruptly peddling influence out of what’s left of the White House.

The simple fact is that back in the 1960s you could rent a small apartment, buy a used car, and put yourself through college on a minimum wage job. I know because I did it (pumping gas, washing dishes, working as a part-time DJ), as did millions of my generation. Just ask your grandparents.

So, what happened?

Through most of America’s history, our economic life was similar to that of other countries that practiced unregulated capitalism. Charles Dickens wrote about that era in most of his novels, including Christmas Carol. There was a small 1% that owned about 90% of the nation’s wealth. A small middle class of professionals (doctors, lawyers, retail shop owners, etc.) who worked for the 1% making up around 10%-25% of the population. And a very large cohort of the working poor.

In Christmas Carol, the 1% don’t even show up. Ebenezer Scrooge was the middle class: he was a small businessman who owned a company so meager that it had only one employee. Bob Cratchit was the working poor, who couldn’t even afford to cover the cost of healthcare for his son, Tiny Tim. That was the norm across most of Europe and America from the 16th century right up until the 1930s.

After the Hoover administration and their corrupt Wall Street buddies drove the world economy off the edge with the Republican Great Depression, and America elected Franklin D. Roosevelt to put the country back together, conservatives began to worry aloud about FDR’s advisor, British economist John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes and FDR (and Francis Perkins) had this wild idea that it should be possible to create a nation where at least two-thirds of the people were in the middle class. They’d do it by heavily taxing the morbidly rich (FDR raised it to 77% in 1936), giving union power to working people (Wagner Act, 1935), and providing a solid social safety net — Social Security (1935), a minimum wage (1933/38), unemployment insurance (1935), and Food Stamps (1939) — to create a middle-class floor.

The programs were universally decried by the GOP as socialism, the doorway to communism, and “radically anti-American.” Every major social program since the 1930s has been opposed by Republicans, and in the 1950s Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater and other “thinkers” in the movement provided a rationale for their opposition.

They argued, throughout the 1950s, that if the middle class ever got “too large,” American society would begin to disintegrate “under the weight of FDR’s socialist programs.”

Kirk and Buckley warned that women would forget their place in the kitchen and bedroom, young people would stop respecting their elders and the value of hard work, and racial minorities would demand social and economic equality with whites. The result would be societal chaos leading to the downfall of America as we knew it.

Their warnings were largely ignored or even ridiculed through the 1950s as the nation’s prosperity steadily increased and we shot past that 50% threshold.

And then came the 1960s, as we passed 60% of us in Kirk’s dreaded middle class.

The birth control pill was legalized in 1961; within a few years there was a full-blown women’s movement. The Civil Rights movement was embraced by the Kennedy brothers and Black people began to fight back against police brutality, causing multiple cities to erupt into flames. And by 1967, young men were refusing military service, protesting in the streets, and burning their draft cards.

The collective response of the Republican Party was something like, “Holy crap! Russell Kirk, Bill Buckley, and Barry Goldwater were right!! The country is on the verge of something like the Bolshevik Revolution that led straight to communism!!!”

Thus, Ronald Reagan came to the White House in 1981 with a simple mandate: cut the middle class down to size to restore social and political stability. To save the nation.

He started by destroying the unions that supported high wages and benefits. A third of us were unionized when Reagan came into office; now it’s in single-digits and Trump just de-unionized an additional few-hundred-thousand federal workers.

Then he instituted the first long-lasting freeze on the minimum wage (9 years), cut the top income tax rate from 74% to 27%, “reformed” Social Security by raising the retirement age to 67 and taxing its benefits as income, ended enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine (1987), gutted federal support for colleges, and threw small local businesses to the wolves by abandoning enforcement of 100 years of anti-monopoly laws and securities regulations that forbade stock buy-backs.

Statistics from the Federal Reserve

Before Reagan, the middle class was thriving and growing and you could get into it with a minimum wage job. A union job, like my dad had at an a tool-and-die shop, was virtually a lifetime guarantee of stability solidly in the middle of the middle of class.

Look through newspapers of that era and they talked about “wage-earner income” because most middle-class families were making it just fine with a single paycheck. Today, instead, you’ll find references to “household income” because it takes two or more paychecks to maintain the same standard of living a family could in the 1960s and 1970s with one wage-earner.

In the intervening years, Republicans (and a few “moderate” and “Third Way” Democrats) have continued the Kirk/Buckley/Goldwater/Reagan project of dismantling Keynes’ and FDR’s grand middle class project.

As a result, the middle class has shrunk to fewer than 50% of us, and it takes two paychecks to do it. Student debt has frozen two generations out of the American Dream. Healthcare expenses destroy a half-million American families every year. Republicans have kept the minimum wage frozen for sixteen long years as they transferred fully $50 trillion from working class homes and families into the money bins of the top 1%.

Trump’s Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill simply continues Reagan’s assault on the American middle class. You could call it, “Making America safe for the morbidly rich like in the 1920s.”

He even had a Great Gatsby party at Mar-a-Lardo over the weekend to celebrate his accomplishments: We now have more billionaires, and richer billionaires, than any other country in the history of the planet. Trump himself and his boys are setting an example for the pillaging of America: they have taken in at least, by some estimates, $5 billion in just the first 10 months of his presidency.

We stand in a pissed-off progressive populist moment, although that movement is up against a massive wall of billionaire-owned media and infrastructure. Five bought-off Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized bribery of judges and politicians. Bondi and Noem are spouting lies to militarize our cities, presumably in anticipation of the 2026 and 2028 elections.

If America is to survive as a democratic republic, our middle class must again become the beating heart of both our economy and our politics. That means restoring strong unions, ending legalized bribery of politicians and judges, breaking up corporate monopolies, providing healthcare and education to everybody, and taxing billionaires enough to rebuild the social contract that made this country great in the first place.

Every generation faces a choice between oligarchy and democracy, between government by the people and government by the morbidly rich. We made the right choice in 1932, when my parents’ generation rose up and said “enough.” It’s past time for ours to do the same.

Vote.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Great American Heist”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink is now available in bookstores nationwide.
You can follow me on Blue Sky here: https://bsky.app/profile/thomhartmann.bsky.social