While the background of the man who assassinated American health insurance CEO Brian Thompson is now being extensively mined for insights into his motivation, the widespread reaction — hatred directed at US health insurers — led to much pearl-clutching in the US media. CNN showed viewers the “unexpected reaction” to the assassination, consisting of scores of posts about how hated Thompson’s company was. The New York Times reported on the “blatant lack of sympathy” and “morbid glee” of the reaction. Two academics from the Yale School of Management rushed to reassure readers “most Americans admire business leaders and see them as a stabilising force”. Fox News blamed the left for the reaction.
In a more insightful piece, veteran online culture analyst Zeynep Tufekci noted “the rage that people felt at the health insurance industry, and the elation that they expressed at seeing it injured, was widespread and organic. It was shocking to many, but it crossed communities all along the political spectrum and took hold in countless divergent cultural clusters.”
“I can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated,” she wrote — and if anyone can speak with authority on the issue, Tufekci can. She went on to link contemporary America with the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, not merely in terms of dramatic inequality in wealth but the intensity and growth in political violence.
The level of political violence in the US is now at its highest level since the early 1970s, a period of widespread and diverse terrorism and political violence, including assassination attempts. By one count, there have been 300 incidents of political violence in the US since Donald Trump’s failed insurrection in 2021.
Trump — who was himself the target of an assassination attempt, albeit one for which the motives remain unknown — and his looming return to the White House has nothing directly to do with the murder of Thompson. But Trump has repeatedly endorsed political violence, and not merely in his attempt to overthrow the government in 2021. From urging police violence, to praising assaults on journalists and fantasising about the rape of reporters, to demanding the shooting of protesters, Trump has done more than any other major political figure of recent decades to legitimise and encourage political violence.
In that context, the assassination of a CEO of a company notorious for denying and delaying healthcare services to its members is just another data point in the steady rise in the intensity of political violence in the United States — as is the enthusiasm for the murder online.
That enthusiasm is very much Trump’s America. It has nothing to do with Trump’s own personal endorsement of violence, but a lot to do with the anger and alienation of American voters that Trump has so brilliantly exploited to achieve his political comeback. As an avatar of resentment and retribution, Trump promises his supporters a return to justice and fairness — as interpreted through their own narrow lens of race and class.
But the internal contradiction of Trump is that he is ultimately a force for an elite capitalist status quo — which is why one of his few achievements during his first presidency was a massive tax cut for the largest American corporations, one that delivered none of the benefits for ordinary Americans its advocates claimed it would.
For his second presidency, far more than his first, Trump is packing his cabinet and White House with billionaires and super-wealthy figures, all hoping to cash in on their proximity to the incoming president. While making a mockery of right-wing arguments that his victory was some sort of blow to elites, it is consistent with Trump’s role in the long American history of politicians of both parties using cultural issues like racism as a means of ensuring voters do not threaten corporate interests.
There is no inevitability that the tension between exploiting alienation and failing to do anything to address the causes of it will become apparent to voters — even if Trump will have no excuses given the Republicans will control Congress as well as the White House. Trump, like Republicans of recent generations, and the Democrats before the 1960s, can always conjure up another figure towards which resentment and alienation can be channelled. But there might be a lot more assassinations and political violence along the way.
Have something to say about this article? Write to us at letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
