Why do we feel more comfortable cheering a CEO’s assassination than Trump’s?

Exhausted and resigned, we are teetering on the edge of a very bloody slope. Also, single-payer healthcare is Democrats’ lowest hanging fruit.

Two people tried to kill Donald Trump this year. Both times, the great bulk of the internet (including me) reacted with condemnation.¹ This is despite Donald Trump being:

1. One of the most loathed and loathsome people on the planet;

2. Extremely dangerous, on account of the enormous power he’s about to acquire, and his clear intent to use that power to inflict tremendous harm;

3. Significantly worse than the people likeliest to replace him were he to die, in my arguable but common opinion.

Three days ago, a gunman assassinated UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson using bullets engraved with the words “delay,” “deny,” and “depose.” But this time, the internet’s reaction has been unbridled glee. A former columnist for the Washington Post wrote a Substack titled “Yes, ‘we’ want insurance executives dead.” The New York Times reports that on social media:

“Many…urged people with information about the killing not to share it with the authorities. Names and photos of other health insurance executives floated around. Some of the posts that went most viral, racking up millions of views by celebrating the killing, I can’t repeat here.

It’s true that any news with shock value would get some of this response online — after all, trolling, engagement bait and performative provocation are part of everyday life on digital platforms. But this was something different. The rage that people felt at the health insurance industry, and the elation that they expressed at seeing it injured, was widespread and organic.

Even on Facebook, a platform where people do not commonly hide behind pseudonyms, the somber announcement by UnitedHealth Group that it was “deeply saddened and shocked at the passing of our dear friend and colleague” was met with, as of this writing, 80,000 reactions; 75,000 of them were the “haha” emoji.

However evil you may find the health insurance industry, I hope you could agree that Thompson personally was less evil than Donald Trump. Certainly, he was vastly less powerful or dangerous than Donald Trump. So what explains the difference in reaction to these shootings, especially on the left?

One principled difference could be that assassinating political candidates is undemocratic: it denies voters the right to choose their political leaders. I wrote in July that it “subverts the peaceful processes on which just and stable governance relies, and unravels our proud tradition of self-rule at an already precarious moment.” And sure, political assassinations are more destabilizing for society than regular murders.

But I don’t think political theory explains the emotional gap here. It feels to me like two other factors play a bigger role: the extent of public fury at our broken healthcare system, and general post-election exhaustion—burnout, depression, and dread of the next four years—prompting thoughtful people to just give up; to resign themselves to nihilism and indulge their animosities.

Both factors are instructive. But to me, that second thing is the story. It’s something Trump is to blame for, and what I most feared his reelection would do to our politics. And it’s the same mindset apparent in Democrats’ collective shrug about Biden pardoning his son, after swearing up and down that he wouldn’t. After basing his whole campaign on the promise that he wouldn’t, because that’s what made us better than Trump.

I fear that a key part of the answer here is that one assassination attempt occurred before the election, while the other took place after. For four years, Democrats centered their pitch around the idea that Donald Trump was a threat to democracy. By democracy, they specifically meant the rule of law (which Trump the felon broke many times) and liberal norms against political violence (which Trump clearly incited on January 6^th, and which his movement incites all over the country).

Then, on election day, a plurality of voters made clear that they don’t care about any of that. So now, the convicted felon rapist traitor liar egomaniac who literally attempted a coup is going back to the White House. So now, it’s getting really hard for Democrats to care about lofty principles either. As Tim Miller of The Bulwark put it, “the fear and anger has led to a sort of surrender. A hardening of the heart.” It’s the left-wing version of “LOL nothing matters.”

Exasperated as I am, I agree with Miller’s plea: Don’t Let Donald Trump Take Your Soul, Too. In that spirit, I have three thoughts about the Thompson assassination.

1. Thompson’s killer belongs in jail, and it’s more important now than ever this be the loudest thing we say in response to political violence.

The most important political divide in our country today is between people who think words and laws have failed so it’s time for bullets, and people trying desperately to pull us back from that ledge. Your opinions about the U.S. healthcare system are no more relevant to this point than my opinions about Donald Trump. Celebrating or trivializing the murder of business leaders because their business practices anger you may give you a fleeting schadenfreude, but it will not improve those business practices or help sick people. What it will do is embolden fascists and give pretense for reciprocal violence against your political tribe.

Cheering the killing of Brian Thompson eggs on the worst impulses of the populist right at the very moment when they are set to regain power. It accelerates our country’s descent into a politics of might makes right. Overeducated progressives sharing glib memes on BlueSky are unlikely to be the sort of person who comes out on top in a might-makes-right world, so a lot of people on my feed seem insufficiently alarmed by the distribution of hit lists. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

2. The U.S. healthcare system is completely, infuriatingly broken — but insurance company CEOs are a lazy scapegoat for that problem.

A common illiberal tactic is to obfuscate the boundary between violence and nonviolence. Taylor Lorenz’s incendiary post about wanting insurance executives dead was guilty of this. She writes:

“This is what the media fails to understand. They don't see insurance CEOs who sanction the deaths of thousands of innocent people a year by denying them coverage, often coverage doctors deem medically necessary, as violent.

Journalist Kylie Cheung put it this way: "The way we're socialized to see violence only as interpersonal—not see state violence (policies that create poverty/kill), structural violence, institutional violence—is very deliberate.”

People have very justified hatred toward insurance company CEOs because these executives are responsible for an unfathomable amount of death and suffering.

No, they are not. The failures of U.S. healthcare are systemic, not individual, and they are not “violence” if that word means anything more specific than angry mood response.² Even if you think healthcare is a right and that unlimited amounts of it should be available to everyone free of charge, you cannot expect companies to operate as charities within the system we have. Besides, all insurance systems - including government systems like Medicare for All - require denying some coverage, so it’s really confused to equate this practice with “responsibility” for death and suffering.

Contra Lorenz’s subheading, nobody has ever watched their loved one die from “insurance denial.” They have watched their loved ones die from diseases that take time, money, equipment, highly skilled labor, and miracles of medical technology to cure. That distinction matters deeply to moral culpability, in part because all those resources are scarce, and providing more of them - denying fewer claims - involves tradeoffs that hurt other people. Not just executives of companies with 3% profit margins, but other patients and policyholders whose premiums cover the treatment.

Unless or until Congress nationalizes healthcare/insurance, many more people would die from diseases were it not for insurance companies. And for so long as we have insurance companies, it is “I want a house made of chocolate!”-childish to expect them to pay every claim, as Jeff Maurer explained yesterday. This would quickly result in their going out of business, which would reduce the public’s access to life-saving healthcare. The same is true for government-run health insurance, as Jeff explains:

“Public insurance also makes decisions about what to pay and not pay! This dynamic is not a product of capitalism; it’s a product of reality. Anyone making the “ugh, capitalism — we need Medicare for All” argument about UnitedHealthcare or BCBS is making the dumbest possible argument for M4A, because one of the selling points of nationalized health insurance is that it gives the government enough leverage to tell providers “fuck you, we’re not paying that”. One of Obamacare’s big successes is demonstrating that the government has sufficient leverage to lower payments — you can tell by my punctuation that I’m losing my fucking mind here. Leftists think that if we purged the system of evil capitalists, all procedures would be covered forever, but the truth is that national health insurance just results in the “COVERAGE DENIED” letter coming from the government instead of from UnitedHealthcare.”

That’s not to say all denials are valid or that companies should be immune from criticism. I’ve seen reports that UnitedHealthcare had shady practices and denied more claims than its competitors; maybe Brian Thompson was a crook. Or, maybe they offered lower rates and you get what you pay for. Either way, that’s not why people are cheering, and not what Lorenz argued. Nobody knew who the hell this guy was when the story broke; the mere fact that he was an insurance executive was enough to set off celebration. The anger is not specific to him, and the sentiments in Lorenz’s article and Tweets show why. Any pushback from insurance companies against anything doctors try to charge them is equated with murder by people who see these companies as a Mary Poppins bag of cash. They don’t understand the tradeoffs involved or the incentives doctors face to be just as greedy.

Perhaps you are gathering breath for a rant about why X alternative health system would result in fewer denied claims and more lives saved. Please save your breath; I very possibly agree. I could write ten posts debating the merits of various health insurance systems, and it would all be peripheral to the point I’m making here. The point is that we are hating the player instead of the game, and also oversimplifying the game.

The alternative to having insurance companies is not a utopia where healthcare is free, fast, high quality, infinite, and equally accessible to everyone. Some denial of claims is unavoidable; how many must be denied depends on context and competitive incentives; and if our current system denies too many, it falls on Congress to fix those incentives, not on CEOs to ignore them. Sickness is not violence, and the blame for our failure to treat as many as sick people we could lies with a century of failed reforms to a system that Congress broke in the first place.

That said…

3. The explosive anger this incident reveals towards the U.S. healthcare system makes clear that we need to burn that system to the ground and start over, probably with single-payer “Medicare for All.”

Apart from burnout, depression, and dread of the next four years, the one thing Democrats have reliably grappled with this month is a big ugly fight over how the party should rebuild. I hope to devote a post to that soon, and that post will argue that the policy positions they choose to endorse will probably matter less than how they speak about them, and what values or moods they appeal to in the process. But insofar as the policy details matter, the public’s response to this killing is a big flashing neon sign over one thing their platform needs to include.

The last time Democrats tried to reform healthcare was in 2009-10 with Obamacare. Obamacare did some good things and some bad things, but what it did not do was revolutionize the system. It was a moderate, incremental reform with many ideas that Republicans once endorsed. This was a conscious strategic choice, widely acknowledged at the time.

That choice was controversial, but defensible given the political moment. The Democratic Party was not as progressive as it is today, and conservatives were depicting the first black president as a scary un-American socialist. It was the nadir of the Great Recession and people were anxious; “if you like your insurance, you can keep it” was a powerful reassurance. Democrats only barely got the bill passed, and it only barely got through the Supreme Court, and it only barely survived Trump’s term, none of which would likely have happened had Obama pushed for socialized healthcare.

The political moment today is different, though. People are tired of tinkering around the edges of a fundamentally broken system. They may have said they wanted “change” in 2008, but that desire was rooted in “hope”: in patriotic optimism about what we could do together. In 2024, people want change in a more furious and terrified way. An increasingly bloodthirsty way. I cannot imagine that the shooting of a 50-year-old Dad would have elicited 75,000 laugh reacts on 2009’s Facebook, even if that feature did exist back then.

Nobody can accuse me of the pundit’s fallacy on this one. As you’ve likely gathered, I am no socialist. Idealy, I’d prefer a system with more cost-consciousness, perhaps with government-funded HSAs as a safety net. But that is very far from the system we have now, and peeling back one distortive regulation at a time seems politically unfeasible and overwhelming. I doubt that Medicare for All would result in lower costs, fear it would slow medical innovation, and do not trust the government to run it smoothly, fairly, or efficiently—and yet, it could still be better than the mess we’ve made of the current system.

It would be simpler, for one thing. It would cut out the guesswork and paperwork of navigating byzantine insurance “networks” within the same hospital building. Providers would probably have a clearer, faster sense of what’s covered and what’s not, and those decisions would be more transparent to the public. It would also cut out some of the profit, which I don’t think matters on its own, but would help people chill out a bit and eliminate distractions, perhaps even redirecting anger in a more productive direction. It would help sever the toxic link between employment and insurance and stop suppressing wage growth. It would address inequality and ensure a minimum level of healthcare access for everyone.

And regardless of whether it’s best on the policy merits – again, I could write ten posts – I think voters would leap for it. If this week is any indication, “disband all health insurance companies” seems like a populist winner.

1. Yes, there were a few memes on social media wishing the shooter had better aim, etc. But these were clearly in the minority, and Jack Black’s bandmate got canceled for even joking about it. I don’t have polling data to prove this, but my subjective perception from talking to multiple liberal friends is that the public celebration of, or at least indifference to this week’s killing is way, way higher than it was for Trump. The NYT article I link to substantiates that.

2. Leftists calling everything they don’t like “violence”, then purporting to “educate” people who don’t accept the definitions they made up in conversations with themselves, is exactly the sort of pseudo-intellectual hackery that has the rest of the political spectrum so fed up with them recently. It certainly sounds like Greek to voters.