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Let’s get this out of the way: Luigi Mangione is alleged to have gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of New York, and irrespective of the potential motivation, that is the sort of thing that needs to be punished in a society governed by laws. If we can acknowledge that, we can also acknowledge that anyone surprised that the 26-year-old has become a folk hero is fooling themselves. To be a millionaire health care baron is to be in contention for being the most hated man in America. We live in a country where there’s a decent chance your bank account will get wiped out after a freak car accident. It is not popular to be profiting from that! And so anyone in touch with the precariousness of being alive in America in 2025 can relate to the sympathies thrust upon Mangione by a whole swath of Americans. But Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi are not typical Americans, and for my money, that’s why they made such a show of threatening Mangione with the death penalty today. Here’s Bondi:
“Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson—an innocent man and father of two young children—was a premeditated, cold-blooded assassination that shocked America. After careful consideration, I have directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in this case as we carry out President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.”
Bondi went on to characterize the crime as an act of “political violence” and made the somewhat flat assertion that bystanders near the scene were put at “grave risk of death.” Trump has made a lot of noise about reinstating the use of the federal death penalty, and it’s not really a surprise to anyone that his administration would invoke it here. But by releasing such a haughty statement—which defines Mangione as a political dissident and leans the full weight of the state on his punishment—Trump is showing once again that his populist instincts are in decline. The harsh punishment of Mangione might be in keeping with his chest-thumping on crime, but it’s also bad politics. That’s clear to pretty much everyone outside of Capitol Hill.
Empathizing with Mangione is simply not uncommon, nor is it exclusive to antiestablishment lefties, who relish any evidence of an armed revolt against the entrenched oligarchy, especially when it comes from someone iconoclastically hot. (Case in point: Mangione’s official legal defense fund has accumulated over $700,000 and ticks higher every day.) Really, you see the same compassion for his plight across the entire ideological spectrum—including some of the most partisan arenas on the web. Right after the killing, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro uploaded a YouTube video titled “The EVIL Revolutionary Left Cheers Murder!” which aimed to paint those cheering on Thompson’s killing as a gang of disreputable antifa thugs. Here is a sampling of the top comments on that upload:
Right winger here, you are wrong ben, this man denied 35% of claims. One was my dead parents heart surgery we couldn’t afford. He opted to die instead of give us the debt.
I’m a conservative and have been since I was a teenager. I will shed no tears for this man.
Wow, maybe I’ve been wrong this entire time…. Ben, I don’t think you actually care about us. I think you just want our money. I think you want us to hate each other.
That sentiment pairs nicely with a poll by Emerson College that went around last year, finding that 41 percent of college students deemed the killing “acceptable.” Or the one from the University of Chicago in which 7 in 10 Americans placed at least a “moderate” responsibility for Thompson’s death on the health care industry. The debate has made its way into the orbit of Joe Rogan, who, if you remember, may have helped tilt the election toward Trump. (His take was that private health care was a “dirty, dirty business.”) Meanwhile, Bill Burr, a notoriously unaligned stand-up comedian, has been far more assertive. He advocates for a “Free Luigi” every chance he gets.
Again, none of this should be shocking. The country is locked into a spiraling, seemingly irreversible decline, and regardless of who you voted for, liberals and conservatives alike are vulnerable to the elemental dissatisfaction such a status quo can inspire. People are angry! That is the No. 1 reason Trump is in the White House, and why it’s so curious that he’s unable to read the room—especially when previously, it was his only political talent.
That is not to say it would have been particularly shrewd for the president to have wandered into the Rose Garden and started babbling about what a “very fine person” Luigi Mangione is. (Can you even imagine? I can!) But the administration is determined to make Mangione’s potential capital punishment a nakedly political issue, in a way that appears to deliberately run contrary to the collective angst of his coalition. This has become a pattern. You can sense the same dissonance in the way this administration has propagandized its tariffs, which thus far have been messaged with the idea that patriotic citizens will happily swallow the economic turbulence ahead in order to savor the pride of domestic production. (Never mind, of course, that the single most salient issue in the 2024 election cycle was the skyrocketing cost of groceries, housing, and yes, health care.) The people of this country want to live with dignity, and more importantly, they want those responsible for their suffering to pay. But thus far, the primary target of Trump’s wrath appears to be Americans themselves.
The root of this contradiction might be pretty straightforward. Trump is extremely wealthy, as are his benefactors. In the huddles at Mar-a-Lago, perhaps the only proposal on the table is to rain hell on Mangione. It might work in the short term, but the animosity remains. Someday soon, Americans are going to need a good reason to stop feeling so angry. If Trump doesn’t give them one, who knows who they’ll be sympathizing with next.
