President-elect Donald Trump has criticized public support and admiration for a gunman accused of murdering United Healthcare’s CEO as ‘a sickness’.
Trump made his position on the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson clear as members of the public have continued to swoon over Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League graduate charged in the crime.
‘How people can like this guy – that’s a sickness actually, that’s really very bad,’ said Trump on Monday, referring to Mangione.
‘Especially the way it was done, it was so bad – right in the back.’
Trump added that he believes ‘it’s really terrible that some people seem to admire him, like him’.
‘It was cold-blooded, just a cold-blooded, horrible killing,’ said Trump during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago home.
Trump conveyed disbelief over fandom for the accused assassin, who has been labeled by some as good looking and in alleged writings attacked health insurance companies and corporate greed.
‘You just can’t believe some people – and maybe it’s fake news – I don’t know,’ Trump said.
‘It seems that there’s a certain appetite for (the killer). I don’t get it.’
Mangione is locked up in a Pennsylvania state prison as a grand jury in New York considers charges against him including a count of murder. He was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona on December 9, six days after Thompson was shot in the back and leg outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel where he was set to attend his company’s conference.
Bullet shell casings recovered from the scene had the words ‘delay’, ‘deny’ and ‘depose’, which were eerily similar to the title of the 2010 book Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About.
Mangione in a notebook allegedly wrote of his plans targeting Thompson ‘You wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents.’
While Democrats and Republicans alike have condemned Thompson’s killing, social media has been inundated with memes portraying Mangione as attractive and a martyr of sorts.
Some progressive Democrats have pointed to Americans’ frustrations over health insurance companies denying claims.
‘Of course, we don’t want to see the chaos that vigilantism presents,’ Democratic Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said to Business Insider last week.
‘We also don’t want to see the extreme suffering that millions of Americans confront when your life changes overnight from a horrific diagnosis, and people are led to just some of the worst, not just health events, but the worst financial events of their and their family’s lives.’
By Friday, more than $100,000 had been raised online for Mangione’s legal defense.
Trump in his wide-ranging presser, which was his first since winning the US election, also detailed his meetings with pharmaceutical and tech executives and suggested he may move away from banning TikTok.
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