President-elect Donald Trump once boasted that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and not lose the support of his faithful followers. That musing came on the campaign trail in 2016 in Iowa, when Trump told those assembled: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”
The alleged killer Luigi Mangione, the main suspect in the high-profile shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson that shocked the nation, is accused of committing a crime very similar to what Trump proposed, though the shooting of Thompson took place a few streets away from Fifth Avenue.
The story of Mangione’s alleged crime — as it has been covered in the mainstream media — has chiefly been about the public reaction to the killing. Fox 5 NY published a report entitled “Hero or murderer? Luigi Mangione case sparks polarizing reactions online” and revealed the movement labeled #freeluigi, a hashtag signaling clemency and mercy for the accused killer.
Online, the accused Mangione — even before his identity was known — was lionized as a vigilante justice seeker, as irate health insurance customers across the nation seemed to rally around the suspect they portrayed as a sort of hero, with Thompson’s death celebrated by some as merely the righteous comeuppance for a purveyor of a system that routinely treated people in life-and-death circumstances callously, poorly and unfairly.
The hero worship was seen as yet another a disturbing sign of a collective rage boiling just beneath the surface of American society, fueled by a growing divergence in the economic fates of the haves and have-nots.
At his first post-election press conference at Mar-a-Lago this week, Trump was asked what he thought of the reaction. The President-elect said “I think it’s a terrible thing. I think it’s really terrible that some people seem to admire him, like him.”
“How people can like this guy—that’s a sickness, actually.”
Trump condemns the Left’s reaction to alleged CEO killer Luigi Mangione. pic.twitter.com/PxiMYjAG0A
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) December 16, 2024
Trump continued, saying it was “cold-blooded and how people can like this guy…that’s a sickness actually. Especially the way it was done, it was so bad, right in the back.”
Considering it further, Trump called the reaction unbelievable. ‘”A thing like that, you can’t believe that some people…and maybe it’s fake news, I don’t know. It’s hard to believe that that can even be thought of.”
