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In another meandering news conference Monday, President-elect Donald Trump condemned fans of Luigi Mangione, who police allege shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a New York City sidewalk weeks ago. (Mangione’s lawyer has said he will plead not guilty to all charges.)
Mangione has been celebrated by some as a folk hero. And that celebrity has clearly gotten under Trump’s skin.
During his news conference, Trump said:
I think it’s really terrible that some people seem to admire him, like him. And I was happy to see that it wasn’t specific to this gentleman that was killed. It’s just an overall sickness, as opposed to a specific sickness. That was a terrible thing. It was cold-blooded. Just a cold-blooded, horrible killing. And how people can like this guy is — that’s a sickness, actually.
I agree with the premise here: Celebrating vigilante violence is sick. That was the argument in this ReidOut Blog I wrote, denouncing the hero worship of Mangione and Daniel Penny, the New York man who was recently acquitted of criminally negligent homicide after a subway passenger died when Penny placed him in a choke hold.
Trump, however, did some elevating of Penny himself when he appeared with Penny at last weekend’s Army-Navy football game. So, yes, vigilantes are bad. And Trump isn’t a credible voice on the matter.
Penny is not the first vigilante whom Trump has celebrated, either. In 2021, Trump said that Kyle Rittenhouse is “a nice young man” after meeting him in the weeks after Rittenhouse was acquitted of fatally shooting two men during a 2020 protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Trump has praised the violent insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol in an effort to keep him in power, and he’s repeatedly made light of the brutal attack on Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s husband by a right-wing conspiracy theorist.
So it seems Trump doesn’t object to vigilante violence in every circumstance. I think this is where Trump and MAGA misjudge the risks of their permissive approach to violence. That’s why Trump’s complaint about the admittedly disturbing praise for the suspect in the killing of a wealthy insurance CEO rings hollow. A society that promotes vigilantism — that places us at the whims of the most violent and impulsive among us — makes all of us less safe, including wealthy elites.
And few have had a greater hand in constructing such a society around us than Donald Trump.