The reaction to the killing of health insurance executive Brian Thompson is the latest example of the strength of visceral anti-elite sentiment coursing through the country.
Even though the motive for the killing of Thompson, 50, is not yet clear, the gunman’s actions have drawn out antagonism toward the health insurance industry in general.
Social media users have sometimes outright gloated at the killing, which took place early Wednesday on a Manhattan street, as the UnitedHealthcare CEO prepared to address an investor conference. An as-yet-unidentified assailant came up from behind and shot him.
“Thoughts and sympathy today to all of those who have lost loved ones, because they were denied insurance claims by #UnitedHealthcare,” stated one post on social media. Another posted a mock logo for the company featuring crosshairs, along with the question, “Do you think I’d get sued if I made this as a shirt.”
Online, even some who have stopped well short of an endorsement of the fatal act have often referenced what they consider to be callous behavior by health insurance companies — a callousness that they blame for deaths in the thousands.
Their argument is that sympathy for the fate suffered by Thompson is not the whole story — and that people who have been victimized by the insurance industry’s greedy chicanery deserve their share of empathy too.
That view, right or wrong, places the health insurance industry alongside a whole cast of characters against whom populist rage has been turned in the past dozen or so years.
Among them are business titans at the time of the financial crisis and Great Recession; public health professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic; and members of the perceived “political establishment” on both sides of the aisle, blamed for a deepening atmosphere of national dysfunction.
From a political standpoint, President-elect Trump is the most obvious beneficiary of those populist sentiments, winning two elections out of three despite being subject to frequent, loud derision from much of the media.
Still, broadly similar sentiments have also found expression on the left, lifting up Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — at one time seen as a fringe figure — to twice be a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination. The younger progressives of the “squad,” most notably Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), have tapped into the same mood.
But it is Trump, far more than anyone else, who has stoked the populist fire on the right.
He does so in speeches castigating his opponents in unusually inflammatory terms, but also arguing more broadly that the game is rigged against regular Americans.
One of Trump’s most memorable metaphors — his professed desire to “drain the swamp” of Washington, D.C. — has served to capture the sense of a corrupt status quo that serves its own interests at the expense of anyone outside of its confines.
Critics argue that Trump himself is as much of a swamp-creature as anyone, for reasons up to and including his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election.
Still, Trump has extended his critique to foreign affairs too, where he often depicts the United States as being exploited by other nations and by multilateral institutions.
Earlier this year, for example, the president-elect came under fire when right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said Trump had told him he would suspend U.S. aid to Ukraine.
But a spokesperson insisted that Trump’s actual concern was that he “believes European nations should be paying more of the cost of the conflict, as the U.S. has paid significantly more, which is not fair to our taxpayers.”
In any event, one of the overarching lessons of Trump’s November victory was that Democratic arguments that the president-elect was dangerous did not work — in part because many Americans actively want someone to threaten the status quo.
A voter analysis undertaken for The Associated Press and Fox News, for example, asked respondents how much change they would like to see in how the country is run.
Vice President Harris carried those who wanted “no change” by almost 2-to-1 over Trump. The problem for her was that only a measly 2 percent of voters held that view.
More than 1-in-4 voters were seeking “complete and total upheaval.” Trump carried that group by more than 40 points, 71 percent to 27 percent.
The reasons why such sentiments are so widely felt predate Trump’s entry into politics by many years.
For a start, the supposed wisdom of experts has proven catastrophically wrong on at least two of the most monumental events of the past quarter-century.
The “slam dunk” case that the CIA saw for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq having weapons of mass destruction proved to be false — but only after the United States had led a bloody and costly invasion that led to thousands of U.S. soldiers from across the country being wounded or killed.
A few years later, with the U.S. financial system creaking, figures like Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the 2008 GOP nominee, proclaimed that the “fundamentals of the economy are strong.”
The greatest meltdown since the Great Depression soon ensued.
The pandemic was not such a clear-cut case, but at a minimum there are millions of Americans who believe the importance of mask mandates was exaggerated and that the shuttering of schools lasted too long and had profoundly damaging impacts.
Somewhere in between the Great Recession and the pandemic, social media exploded, transforming the information landscape and greatly eroding the legacy media’s authority.
The traditional media’s flaws were real, but the splintering of the media environment also opened up the gates for a proliferation of conspiracy theorists and other bad-faith actors.
In the political space, “news” geared to reinforcing existing partisan biases — and, often, to feeding the flames of outrage — also multiplied.
There was, to be clear, plenty to be outraged about for many Americans — years of wage stagnation for workers, staggering levels of wealth inequality and the evisceration of much of the American manufacturing industry.
Pile onto the pyre the often angry debates around perennially divisive topics like race, gender, sexual identity and religion — as well as a broad erosion of social and communal bonds — and it’s no wonder the fabric of American life is so strained.
The strain is going to keep showing up — just as it did in reaction to the killing of Thompson this week.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.
