How Celebrating Luigi Mangione Fuels Trumpism and Impedes Real Social Change

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 Now that the dust has begun to settle after the initial excitement and flurry of social media fervor celebrating Luigi Mangione’s murder of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson, maybe we can start a conversation assessing this prevalent celebratory response as well as its political significance and political value for imagining and doing the work necessary for meaningful and long-term change to make a more equal U.S. society and political economy that meets the basic needs, including health care, of all Americans.

Look, to be completely honest, I was more than a little entertained initially by the spates of macabre humorous quips populating social media, stuff like, “I’d send my condolences, but they aren’t covered.” When social media users learned of the McDonald’s employee who turned in Mangione, I admit I laughed hard at the post I saw that read, “A Waffle House employee would never . . .”  because I love Waffle House.

But let’s face it, as I said, this humor is macabre and comes from a very dark place in the American soul, a place roiling in frustration, pain, anger, desperation, worry, anxiety, fear, and a profound sense of injury, injustice, and powerlessness.  In this state of anger and powerlessness, many Americans understandably feel a rush of satisfaction at seeing someone take aim at someone making millions overseeing the health insurance (don’t say health care!) industry that is an unnecessary middleman doing more to deprive Americans of health care than facilitate its delivery.

This response, though, is coming from our political id, that lawless and anti-social part of our psyche Dr. Sigmund Freud thought required repression and restraint for us to enjoy the fruits of something called civilization.

I can certainly anticipate a reader at this point saying, “Well, our world isn’t really civilized when we have people dying because they can’t get adequate health care, so we should be lawless in attacking this version of so-called “civilization” that is so inhumane and uncivilized.”

While I’m sympathetic to this view and certainly agree our so-called civilization falls far short of warranting that name, I don’t think following the political id and celebrating murder is provides a way forward towards achieving a humane civilization that ensures its people’s needs are met and social wealth and resources are reasonably shared.

In fact, to cut to the chase, this celebration of Mangione mirrors the same bankrupt politics of retribution, of vengeance, that Donald Trump offered the American people, and which enough of the people lapped up to elect him president.  In the case of Trump, far from offering liberation, this vengeance politics promises to deliver an intensified repression. In the case of Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson, those who celebrated experienced a kind of sugar high at seeing a blow levied against corporate America, but it was just that: a sugar high. It didn’t offer a political imagination of change or concrete action steps to actually challenge corporate power and economic injustice and inequality in a meaningful way, although history as well as our contemporary socio-political landscape offers us many examples and possibilities.

In short, Mangione’s vigilantism and many Americans’s apotheosis of it comes from the same sad, dangerous, and bankrupt place that spawns Trump’s retributive politics, tapping into people’s anger, desperation, and impatience to promise an impossibly quick fix that he will never deliver. Would that it were only a promise full of sound and fury signifying nothing as opposed to the damaging assault on civil and human rights and people’s economic lives Trump seems poised to unleash on us, given the way he is filling key positions.

I don’t know if the folks celebrating Mangione’s murder overlap with those who elected Trump, but there’s a certain irony in my mind in the flood of support for Mangione coming on the heels of our nation electing Trump and vesting more power in a Republican Party that has repeatedly sought to repeal the Affordable Care Act, blocked efforts to improve it (such as a creating a public option), and repeatedly articulates a platform that wants to undermine Medicare and Medicaid.

Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration has already begun the work of taking on big pharma and corporate America.  Reducing the cost of insulin for seniors was just the beginning of their efforts, of Democrats’ efforts, to challenge the excesses and injustices corporate America has been getting away with. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 paved the way for Medicare to negotiate the costs of prescription drugs, which promises to reduce healthcare costs for Americans and the government and to stabilize the Medicare program. Much of this act goes into effect in 2026. You can bet Donald Trump will try to take credit for its results even as he and his party generally seek to undermine Americans’ access to affordable and quality health care.

And if Americans really wanted a way to address the corporate stranglehold on Americans’ lives, they might look to unions. Instead of elevating Mangione as some rebel folk hero, why not see UAW President Shawn Fain as well as the thousands of autoworkers whose union he led in a successful strike against automakers in 2023. Among other key gains, just look at the fact that on average Ford workers received a $10,000 check representing their shares of the company’s profits. 

Let me suggest that if you want to really challenge corporate power, organizing people to work together as one, as a union,  is a good way to go, as we see workers at a Kentucky battery plant workers trying to do with help from the UAW.

We didn’t hear too much about the Ford workers receiving these bonuses in the mainstream corporate media, just as we didn’t get much coverage of the 2023 strike and just as we’ve heard nothing about the workers organizing in Kentucky.

The story is not only not as sexy and spectacular as that of Mangione’s murder, it’s a far more productive, useful, and inspiring story of how to take on corporate power and win and really address the class system and class inequality in America.

These stories don’t just offer a sugar high; they offer long-sustenance, a real way to imagine and chart a path forward for social change that moves us toward greater equality.

It takes more than anger. While Anger can provide political energy to fire and fuel engaged activism, even a movement, finally we need strategy rooted in clear-headed thinking, which anger can cloud, and sustained energy that builds movements and counter-institutions, such as unions, as well the ongoing and consistent action that these institutions organize and support.

Stories like that of Mangione’s murder do more to distract us than inspire us to engage in the kinds of concrete political actions that make a difference for our lives.

And the celebration and heroizing of his actions tend to fuel a very counterproductive and damaging politics of retribution such as that Trump peddles.

We need a politics of redistribution, not retribution.  If we stop and think, overcoming fear and desperation, we can see the possibilities and the realities before our eyes.