In December, Luigi Mangione was arrested for shooting health insurance executive Brian Thompson. Last week, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced that she was seeking the death penalty. It’s a highly unusual announcement, since Mangione hasn’t even been indicted yet on a federal level. (He has been indicted in Manhattan.) By intervening in this high-profile case, the Trump administration has made clear that it believes that CEOs are especially important people whose deaths need to be swiftly and mercilessly avenged.
The bullets Mangione used to kill Thomson had “deny,” “delay,” and “depose” inscribed on them. It was an expression of anger against an industry whose business model rests on an enormous amount of human suffering. While the majority of Americans do not believe that Mangione’s actions were acceptable — only 17 percent support his actions — the percentage is much higher among the young. Forty-one percent of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine would describe Mangione’s actions as acceptable.
It’s not hard to understand the views of this demographic. A recent poll found that one out of every six Americans was staying in a job that they would otherwise leave out of fear of losing their insurance, although even among the insured delays and denials are common. And they’re the lucky ones. Tens of millions of Americans don’t have insurance at all. The whole system is grotesque.
None of this, of course, is to say that what Mangione did was justifiable or wise. The theory that individual acts of violence…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
