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Time Magazine’s ‘Man of the Year’ has aleady lost interest in his campaign promises

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 13, 2024

Time magazine’s interview with President-elect Donald Trump, published yesterday, revealed a man who was so desperate to be reelected to the presidency that he constructed a performance that he believed would woo voters, but who has no apparent plans for actual governance.

Trump deliberately patterned the Republican National Convention where he accepted the party’s nomination for president on a professional wrestling event, even featuring a number of professional wrestlers. It appears now that the campaign itself was, similarly, a performance—possibly, as Tom Nichols of The Atlantic suggested, simply to avoid the threat of conviction in one of the many federal or state cases pending against him. In the Time interview, Trump called his campaign “72 Days of Fury.”

During the campaign, Trump repeatedly promised he would “slash” the prices that soared during the post-pandemic economic recovery, although in fact they have been largely stable for the past two years. He hammered on the idea that he would erase transgender Americans from public life—the Republicans invested $215 million in ads that pushed that theme, making it a key cultural battle. He and his surrogates attacked immigrants, lying that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, for example, were eating local pets and that Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and falsely claiming that the Biden administration had opened the southern border.

The Time interview suggests that, now that he has won back power, Trump has lost interest in the promises of the campaign.

Notably, when a Time journalist asked Trump if his presidency would be a failure if he doesn’t bring the price of groceries down, he answered: “I don’t think so. Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard. But I think that they will.” He then pivoted to a different subject, and that was all he had to say about the price of groceries.

When the journalist asked Trump about the current attempt of Republican lawmakers to force transgender women to use men’s bathrooms, Trump indicated he didn’t really want to talk about it, noting that “it’s a very small number of people we’re talking about, and it’s ripped apart our country.” Caitlyn Jenner, who is herself transgender, is a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago and has indicated she uses the women’s bathroom there.

Asked whether he would reverse Biden’s protections for transgender children under the Title Nine section of the Education Amendments of 1972, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, Trump clearly hadn’t given the issue much thought. Although it was this expansion that fed Trump’s rhetorical fury over what Republicans claimed was boys participating in girls’ sports, he answered simply:” I’m going to look at it very closely. We’re looking at it right now. We’re gonna look at it. We’re gonna look at everything. Look, the country is torn apart. We’re gonna look at everything.”

Trump’s response to the interviewer about immigration can’t really be parsed because it remains based in a completely false version of the actual conditions, including that the Biden administration has admitted more than 13,000 murderers to the U.S.—which has been repeatedly debunked—and that other countries are emptying “people from mental institutions” into the U.S., an apparent misunderstanding of the word “asylum” in immigration. Under both U.S. and international law, a person fleeing violence or persecution has the right to apply for protection, or asylum, in another country.

If Trump has now abandoned the performance he used to win the election, Trump’s planned appointments to office reveal that the actual pillars of his presidency will be personal revenge, the destruction of American institutions, and the use of political office for gain, also known as graft.

Trump appears to have tapped henchmen for revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable to the law. On Tuesday, Department of Justice inspector general Michael Horowitz reported that during Trump’s first term, his Justice Department secretly seized records from 2 members of Congress and 43 congressional staffers as well as phone and text records from journalists.

That use of the Department of Justice against those he considers his enemies seems to have been behind his attempt to make loyalist former Florida representative Matt Gaetz the United States attorney general. Mired in a sex-trafficking scandal, Gaetz had to step aside. Trump then tapped former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, whose support for him extended not only to pushing the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election but also, apparently, to dropping Florida’s case against the fraudulent Trump University in exchange for a $25,000 donation to one of Bondi’s political action committees. The conservative Washington Examiner has urged U.S. senators to “closely scrutinize” Bondi in confirmation hearings.

The Justice Department oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Trump’s handling of the director of the FBI also appears to be aimed at his enemies. In 1976, Congress established that an FBI director would serve a single ten-year term, with the idea that such a director would not be tied to a single president. In 2017, Trump fired the Republican FBI director picked by President Barack Obama, James Comey, after Comey refused to drop the investigation into the ties between Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives. In Comey’s place, he settled on Christopher Wray.

But Wray oversaw the FBI’s investigations into the pro-Trump January 6 rioters and the raid on Mar-a-Lago after Trump lied about retaining top secret documents. Trump was also angry that Wray told a congressional committee that he had seen no sign of cognitive decline in President Joe Biden.

Trump made it clear he intended to get rid of Wray and replace him with extreme loyalist Kash Patel. Wray’s term expires in 2027, but on Wednesday he announced he would step down at the end of Biden’s term, as Trump wants him to. Trump cheered the announcement, saying the FBI had “illegally raided” his home—in fact, a judge signed off on a search warrant—and added: “We want our FBI back.”

Kash Patel has vowed to dismantle the FBI, as well as to go after media that he considers disloyal to Trump. He has written a trilogy of children’s books about Trump, titled “The Plot Against the King,” and he has published an “enemies list” of 60 people he believes should be investigated for crimes because of their political stances.

Trump’s appointments also feed his anti-establishment supporters who want to destroy institutions, especially his tapping of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become the secretary of Health and Human Services. A leader in the anti-vax movement, Kennedy has attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Today, Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times reported that the lawyer who is helping Kennedy pick the health officials he will bring into office, Aaron Siri, has tried to stop the distribution of 13 vaccines. In addition, in 2022 he petitioned the FDA to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine. If approved, Kennedy will oversee the FDA.

The third pillar of Trump’s presidency appears to be graft for himself, his cronies, and his family. Dana Mattioli and Rebecca Ballhaus of the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is planning to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund in an effort to shore up his ties to the incoming president.

Mark Zuckerberg of Meta handed over $1 million as well, as did both the chief executive officer of OpenAI and AI search startup Perplexity. Trump has refused to sign the paperwork that would require him to disclose the donors to the inauguration fund.

Today, Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark called the fund “a slush fund, pure and simple.” There is no required accounting for how the money is spent, making it, as Last says, “a way for rich people to funnel money to the incoming president that he can then use however he sees fit, completely unfettered and under cover of darkness. The inauguration fund is no different than feudal lords approaching the new king with gifts of rubies, or mobsters showering a new mayor with envelopes of cash.”

There are other ways for people to buy influence in the new administration. As Judd Legum pointed out on December 2 in Popular Information, crypto currency entrepreneur Justin Sun, a Chinese national, bought $30 million in crypto tokens from Trump’s new crypto venture, an essentially worthless investment that nonetheless freed up about $18 million for Trump himself.

In March 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Sun with fraud and market manipulation. Sun posted on social media that his company “is committed to making America great again.”

Trump appears willing to reward cronies with positions that could be lucrative as well, tapping billionaire Tom Barrack, for example, to become his administration’s ambassador to Türkiye. Barrack chaired Trump’s 2016 inauguration fund and was accused—and acquitted—of secret lobbying for the United Arab Emirates in exchange for investments of tens of millions of dollars in an office building and one of his investment funds.

Trump is also putting family members into official positions, tapping his son Don Jr.’s former fiancee Kimberly Guilfoyle to become the U.S. ambassador to Greece shortly after news broke that Don Jr. is seeing someone else. Trump is pushing Florida governor Ron DeSantis to name his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to the Senate seat that will be vacated by Marco Rubio’s elevation to secretary of state, and he has tapped his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, to become his Middle East advisor.

Various newspapers have reported that Boulos’s reputation as a billionaire mogul at the head of Boulos Enterprises is undeserved: in fact, he is a small-time truck salesman who has nothing to do with Boulos Enterprises but permitted the confusion, he says, because he doesn’t comment on his business.

And then there is Eric Trump, who announced yesterday that the Trump Organization has made a deal with Dubai-based real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump Tower in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. When asked about potential conflicts of interest, Eric Trump said: “I have no interaction with Washington, D.C. I want no interaction with Washington, D.C.”

So far, there has been little outcry over Eric Trump’s announcement, despite years of stories focusing on Republicans’ claims that Hunter Biden and President Biden had each taken $5 million from the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Yesterday the key witness behind that accusation, Alexander Smirnov, pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI and hiding the more than $2 million he received after that testimony.

Early this month, President Biden pardoned Hunter, saying that he had been charged “only because he is my son,” and that “there’s no reason to believe it will stop here.” On December 5, Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) told the Fox News Channel that House Republicans would continue to investigate Hunter Biden despite the pardon.

If there is one major continuity between Trump’s campaign and plans for his administration, it is that his focus on shock and performance, rather than the detailed work of governing, still plays well to the media.

The fall of Assad changes everything

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 12, 2024

Ten days ago, on December 2, President Joe Biden arrived in Angola, the first U.S. president to visit central Africa since President Barack Obama traveled there in 2015. In the United States, the story got lost under the president’s pardon of his son Hunter Biden, but it is the far more important one, since events in the 54 countries on the continent of Africa are key to the global future.

The Biden administration has made it a point to strengthen relations between the U.S. and Africa. It recognizes the importance of a continent whose 1.5 billion people are expected to climb to 2.5 billion in the next 25 years, as Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post pointed out last Thursday. The median age of Africa’s inhabitants is 19, and by 2050 it is expected that one out of every four humans on Earth will be African.

The administration has worked to ease African distrust of the U.S. stemming from its history of enslavement, its tendency to back right-wing forces during the post–World War II and Cold War period when African nations threw off colonial rule, and the disdain with which Trump treated African countries during his administration.

The Biden administration hosted the U.S.-Africa leaders’ summit in December 2022, backed the admission of the African Union to the Group of 20, and pledged more than $6.5 billion to the continent to aid security, support democratic institutions, and advance civil rights and the rule of law.

During Biden’s term, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, First Lady Jill Biden, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have all visited the continent. In March 2023, Vice President Kamala Harris visited Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia.

In Angola last week, Biden said that the U.S. is “all-in on Africa.”

He was in Angola to highlight the Lobito Corridor, a development project centered around a rail line linking the port of Lobito, Angola, on Africa’s Atlantic coast, with the city of Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), in Africa’s interior mining region. Biden traveled to Angola for a summit on the Lobito project as well as other infrastructure investment in the region, joining leaders from Angola, DRC, Tanzania, and Zambia on their own continent to demonstrate his conviction that the African people themselves must determine their own future.

The White House, other democratic countries, regional development banks, and international investors have put more than $6 billion behind the Lobito Corridor. They are hoping to ease the transport of critical minerals from interior countries like Zambia and DRC to Lobito. It currently takes a truck about 45 days to make the journey from the interior to Durban, South Africa; the railway would cut the trip out of the interior to about 45 hours.

The railway will strengthen global supply chains for those minerals while also benefiting local people, local governments, and the local region in Angola, Zambia, and DRC. The project includes investments in clean energy, agriculture, trade between countries, and clearing the mines from Angola’s decades-long civil war along the route, all of which will create good jobs for local workers.

“It’s a game-changer. Imagine how transformative this will be for technology, clean energy, for farming, for food security as a whole. It’s faster, it’s cleaner, it’s cheaper and most importantly, I think, it’s just plain common sense,” Biden said at the summit.

The Lobito Corridor is the flagship project of a new investment program from the Group of Seven (G7) called the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII). The G7 is a forum of advanced economies that share values of liberal democracy, and the PGII is the answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has invested billions in infrastructure in developing African countries but brings with it the risk of debt traps for the governments that borrow from it. PGII is designed to connect democratic countries, the private sector, and development banks to create “sustainable and transparent investment in quality infrastructure.”

On December 5, Eugene Robinson noted in the Washington Post that Republicans are blasting Biden’s announcement last Tuesday of $1 billion in additional humanitarian aid to 31 African countries to address famine and displacement. Biden said that this help was “the right thing for the wealthiest nation in the world to do,” and Robinson noted that it is also smart. “Ultimately, it will be Nigerians, South Africans, Ethiopians, Angolans and the people of other African nations who decide the continent’s future,” he wrote. “They will remember who was there beside them all along. And who was not.”

Russia has also been working to gain influence in Africa with an eye to extracting the continent’s valuable minerals. It turned to the continent after Putin’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine began to isolate Russia from other nations and their resources. The Russian Wagner Group of mercenary fighters has been a key player in Africa since then, often called in by authoritarian leaders to suppress political opposition in exchange for access to mines or other valuable resources. Russia has become the biggest supplier of arms to the continent.

The fall of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad threatens Russia’s ability to continue to operate in Africa. As Mike Eckel of Radio Free Europe explained on Monday, Russia launches most of its African operations from the Hmeimim air base and the Tartus naval base on the Mediterranean coast of Syria. Their loss would hamstring those operations. Russian officials are trying to negotiate with the insurgents who overturned Assad’s regime in order to secure those bases as well as Russia’s other footholds in the country. They have gone from calling the insurgents “terrorists” to referring to them as “armed opposition,” and Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Putin has no plans for a public meeting with Assad.

The Syrian ambassador in Moscow told Russian media: “The escape of the head of this system in such a miserable and humiliating manner…confirms the correctness of change and brings hope for a new dawn.” Former Russian and Soviet diplomat Nikolai Sokov told Pjotr Sauer of The Guardian: “Moscow prefers to deal with those who have power and control, [and] discards those who lose them.” But, as the Institute for the Study of War noted, Russia’s inability to preserve Assad’s regime will make the African autocrats see it as an unreliable partner, an impression the Kremlin’s rapid about-face will do little to relieve.

On Monday, a senior administration official emphasized the same idea of self-determination that Biden’s administration applied to development in African countries. He told reporters that Assad’s collapse “is a day for Syrians, about Syrians. It’s not about the United States or anyone else. It’s about the people of Syria who now have a chance to build a new country, free of the oppression and corruption of the Assad family and decades of misrule. We owe them support as they do so, and we are prepared to provide it. But the future of Syria, like the fall of Assad today, will be written by Syrians for Syrians.”

That system, the official suggested, caused Assad’s fall. “[I]t is impossible not to place this week’s events in the context of the decisions the President has made to fully back Israel against Iran and its proxy terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, and Ukraine against Russia,” the official said. After bipartisan support for that position, the official added, “Hamas is on its back; its leaders are dead. Iran is on its back. Hezbollah is on its back. Russia is on its back. It’s just abandoned its only ally in the Middle East. Now, the Assad regime, Russia and Iran’s main ally in the Middle East, has just collapsed. None of this would have been possible absent the direct support for Ukraine and [Israel] in their own defense provided by the United States of America.”

The official recounted the importance of sanctions against the Assad regime and noted that the U.S. has maintained a military presence in Syria to counter the Islamic extremists of ISIS, targeting 75 ISIS targets immediately after Assad’s fall to ensure that ISIS does not regroup in the chaos of the moment.

The official noted that the administration still believes there is a path to a ceasefire and the release of hostages in Gaza, especially in the wake of Assad’s fall and the “dramatically changed balance of power in the region”—“a path…to a Middle East that is far more stable, far more aligned with our interests, and far more aligned with the interests of the people of the Middle East who want to live in peace, without wars, and in prosperity in a region that is more integrated and prosperous and peaceful.”

Today, Secretary of State Blinken traveled to Jordan and Türkiye, where he met with King Abdullah II and President Recep Tayyip Erodğan to promote an “inclusive, Syrian-led” government transition in Syria.

Journalist Mike Eckel noted that “[t]he fall of the Assad regime this past weekend was a tectonic event, reverberating across the entire Middle East and further.” Considering the ties of Russia to Syria, and the role Syrian bases have played in Russian influence in Africa, those reverberations will, in some form, echo across the African continent.

He wasn’t running to do anything. He was running to stay out of jail

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 9, 2024

The sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria yesterday took oxygen away from the airing of President-elect Trump’s interview with Kristen Welker of NBC’S Meet the Press. The interview told us little that we didn’t already know, but it did reinforce what we can expect in the new administration.

As Tom Nichols pointed out after the interview, when Donald Trump ran for the presidency this year, he “wasn’t running to do anything. He was running to stay out of jail. The rest he doesn’t care about.”

Nichols was reacting to the exchange that began when Welker asked the president-elect: “Do you have an actual plan at this point for health care?” Trump answered: “Yes. We have concepts of a plan that would be better.” “Still just concepts? Do you have a fully developed plan?” Welker asked.

The answer, nine years after Trump first said he would repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something cheaper and better, is still no. He went on to add, “I am the one that saved Obamacare,” although he spent his first term trying to weaken it.

Trump also reiterated his plans for revenge against those he perceives to be his enemies. He told Welker that when he is president, the Department of Justice should pursue and jail the members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, more commonly known as the January 6th Committee. He singled out committee leaders Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY).

But it was in his insistence on one specific lie that Trump was most revealing. He told Welker that there were “13,099 murderers released into our country over the last three years. They’re walking down the streets. They’re walking next to you and your family, and they’re very dangerous.”

This statement sets Trump up to be a strongman who will save America from great danger, but it is a lie that has been repeatedly debunked. It originated in a September 2024 letter from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Representative Tony Gonzales (R-TX) listing 13,099 people convicted of homicide as being “non-detained.”

As Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato blog explains, “non-detained” does not mean free to roam the streets; it simply means that those in prison for homicide are not currently detained by ICE. Once they have served their sentences, they go back onto ICE’s docket to be deported unless their countries of origin don’t have repatriation agreements with the U.S., a condition that affects a very small number of people. Releases of criminal migrants into the U.S. dropped during the Biden administration from the numbers released during Trump’s term. In addition, as Nowrasteh points out, the 13,099 figure covers at least 40 years.

Welker tried to correct Trump: “The thirteen thousand figure I think goes back around 40 years,” she said. “No, it doesn’t,” Trump insisted. “It’s within the three-year period. It’s during the Biden term.”

Trump was intent on making Welker and the television audience accept an egregious lie, despite the fact it has been thoroughly debunked. His insistence echoed his determination in January 2017 to make the American people accept his lie that his inauguration crowd was bigger than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama, although we could see with our own eyes that he was lying. He was demanding we reject our own experience and instead let him define how we see the country.

Trump built on a history of narrative shaping that ran through the Republican Party. In 2004 a senior advisor to President George W. Bush famously told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community,” believing that people could find solutions to problems based on their real-world observations. But such a worldview was obsolete, the aide said. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.… We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

America’s right wing has been able to shape reality in large part because of the 1996 advent of the Fox News Channel (FNC), the brainchild of Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Shows on the FNC used clear, simple messaging with colorful graphics that told a story of an America overwhelmingly made up of white, rural folks who hated taxes and an intrusive government, and would do fine if they could just get the socialist Democrats to leave them alone. To spread the new channel, Murdoch initially offered ten dollars per subscriber to each cable company that carried it.

That right-wing echo chamber has expanded until it is now so strong that nearly 70% of Republicans falsely believe Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, despite the fact that the FNC had to pay more than $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after it lied to viewers about that election.

Trump has built on that Republican narrative to create a fantasy world that is badly out of step with reality. It is not easy to see how he will reconcile his vision with real-world events.

He and his supporters might try simply to tell voters that they have done what they promised, and hope that story sells.

When Trump threatened to put a 25% tariff on goods from Mexico until Mexico stopped undocumented migrants from crossing the border, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum told Trump that “encounters at the Mexico–United States border have decreased by 75 percent between December 2023 and November 2024.” Trump then simply told reporters that Sheinbaum had “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border,” and his supporters trumpeted on social media that Trump had closed the border with one phone call.

But convincing people of an alternative reality might be harder with issues closer to home.

Trump has vowed to place a tariff wall around the U.S., for example, at the same time he has promised to bring down the price of consumer goods. “Economists of all stripes say that ultimately, consumers pay the price of tariffs,” Welker told him on Sunday. “I don’t believe that,” Trump answered. He might not believe it, but producers do: car manufacturers as well as major shopping chains have warned that tariffs will force them to raise prices.

On other issues, Trump will have a vocal and established opposition. After his threat to go after the members of the January 6th committee, former representative Liz Cheney said in a statement: “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting.“

“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power. He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building, and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave. This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history.”

Cheney called for the release of the evidence and grand jury material special counsel Jack Smith assembled “so all Americans can see Donald Trump for who he genuinely is and fully understand his role in this terrible period in our nation’s history.”

Nobel laureates generally try to stay out of politics, but today more than 75 of them in medicine, chemistry, economics, and physics wrote a letter to senators urging them not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services. They object to Kennedy’s stand against the scientists and agencies he would oversee. They noted that he has no credentials or relevant experience and that he has opposed life-saving vaccines, promoted conspiracy theories, and attacked the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.

Putting him in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, they write, “would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors.”

There is also the chance that the Fox media empire will not effectively push a right-wing narrative much longer. The Murdoch family is in a struggle over control of that empire after the death of the 93-year-old Rupert. He and his eldest son, Lachlan, want to lock the company into its current political slant, but at least two of the three of Murdoch’s other children who are set to inherit the company do not share their father and brother’s politics.

Rupert has been trying to change the terms of the family trust to cement Lachlan’s control of the empire, but today a commissioner in Nevada ruled against him. Edward Helmore of The Guardian noted that the decision likely means that even if the children do not take the media empire in a different direction, divided leadership will weaken the right-wing message.

Almost 30 years after the Fox News Channel began to shape American politics with a fictional narrative, a different Fox media empire would almost certainly disrupt the right-wing bubble. A lawyer for Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch said they will appeal the decision.

Finally, Pennsylvania law enforcement officials today arrested a “strong person of interest” in the shooting of United Healthcare chief executive officer Brian Thompson. Tonight a court document shows 26-year-old Luigi Mangione has been charged with murder.

Growing fury over the power big business has over ordinary Americans’ lives

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 5, 2024

Yesterday a gunman assassinated the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, as he arrived at a meeting of investors in New York City. While authorities are still investigating, officials have released the information that the casings of the bullets that killed Thompson bore the words “deny,” “defend,” “depose,” all words associated with companies’ denial of health insurance, taken from the longer phrases “deny the claim,” “defend the lawsuit,” “depose the patient.”

While those clues could simply be a red herring, posters on social media have cheered what they seem to see as revenge against an abusive system in which people’s lives are at the mercy of executives who prioritize profits.

Health insurance companies have long been under scrutiny for their practices. For the past two years, ProPublica has run a long series exploring the different ways in which companies have developed systems to deny healthcare coverage to their policyholders.

UnitedHealthcare has been no exception either to such practices or to scrutiny. Its parent group UnitedHealth has a market valuation of $560 billion and was the eighth largest corporation in the world last year as measured by revenue. This year, UnitedHealthcare—Thompson’s unit—is expected to bring in $280 billion in revenue.

UnitedHealth is embroiled in a number of lawsuits. Andrew Stanton of Newsweek reported that on November 14, 2023, families of two now-deceased patients sued UnitedHealthcare over denial of coverage for Medicare Advantage patients for nursing home stays prescribed by their doctors. Medicare Advantage is the private insurance alternative to Medicare that receives a flat fee from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It’s an enormously profitable industry, and UnitedHealth controls almost a third of it.

The lawsuit alleges that UnitedHealthcare uses artificial intelligence to deny claims from Medicare Advantage policyholders. The lawsuit claims that the company knowingly uses an algorithm that makes errors 90% of the time because it also knows that only about 0.2% of policy holders will appeal the decision to deny their claims. Last month the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hammered UnitedHealth for dramatic increases in their denial rates for post-acute care between 2019 and 2022 as it switched to AI authorizations.

On the same day as the shooting, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance covering Connecticut, New York, and Missouri announced it would cover anesthesia during surgery or procedures only for a specific time period in order to make insurance more affordable by reducing overbilling.

After an outcry both from anesthesiologists and the public, the company today retracted its policy change, saying it had never intended to avoid “medically necessary anesthesia,” but meant simply to “clarify the appropriateness of anesthesia consistent with well-established clinical guidelines.” Their explanation might have calmed the news cycle, but its suggestion that the insurance officials rather than doctors should determine what anesthesia is appropriate for a patient during surgery echoed the argument in the UnitedHealthcare lawsuit.

Thompson’s murder seems to be a cultural moment in which popular fury over the power big business has over ordinary Americans’ lives exploded. Maureen Tkacik of The American Prospect noted, “Only about 50 million customers of America’s reigning medical monopoly might have a motive to exact revenge upon the UnitedHealthcare CEO.” The shooter, whose actual motive remains unknown, is fast becoming a folk hero.

Social media has exploded with users writing things like “[t]his claim for sympathy has been denied”; songs featuring the words “deny, “defend,” and “depose”; and recorded commentary condemning the healthcare insurance industry. UnitedHealth Group posted its sadness about Thompson’s death on Facebook yesterday about 1:00 p.m.; 36 hours later the post had 65,000 laughing emojis under it.

Security expert Charlie Carroll expressed surprise to Josh Fiallo of the Daily Beast that Thompson did not have a security detail. “We’re living in a world where people are extremely disgruntled,” Carroll said. “When people lose trust in the system, you start seeing more kidnappings and assassinations because they feel like they have to take matters into their own hands.”

In the wake of the shooting, UnitedHealthcare and several other insurance companies took down from their websites the names and photographs of their officials.

Billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy were on Capitol Hill today where they met with lawmakers to explain their vision for the Department of Government Efficiency, the group designed to cut the U.S. budget. Neither they nor the lawmakers shared much with the press, although Fox Business played a video of Representative Ralph Norman (R-SC) saying that “nothing is sacrosanct,” and “they’re going to put everything on the table,” including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Representative Tom Tiffany (R-WI) told Just The News that cuts to the budget “don’t have to be just the discretionary spending. We can get at some of the mandatory spending also…food stamps, some of those things.” He continued: “There may be more bang for the buck in terms of growing our economy…making regulatory changes, get the impediments out of the way, let those job creators and entrepreneurs really be able to go to work.”

In view of today’s news about healthcare, it’s probably worth remembering that Musk has called for the elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and that Project 2025 has called for making Medicare Advantage—the privatized Medicare in which UnitedHealth specializes—the default enrollment option for Medicare. This would essentially privatize Medicare for the 66 million people who use it, but since Medicare Advantage costs taxpayers about 6% more than Medicare, this would not create the savings Musk is supposed to be finding.

Andrew Perez of Rolling Stone reported today that election financial disclosures filed yesterday revealed that Elon Musk was the secret funder of the “RBG PAC,” a Super PAC created just before the election that claimed Trump had the same position on abortion as the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Although Trump has bragged about overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion and the 2024 Republican platform supported the far-right idea of “fetal personhood”—which would apply all the rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment from the moment a human egg is fertilized—the RBG PAC ran ads promising that Trump would not support a national abortion ban.

Ginsburg’s granddaughter called the comparison of Trump and her grandmother “nothing short of appalling.”

The super PAC was created so late that it avoided disclosure before November 5. It was funded by Musk with an injection of $20.5 million.

Bridget Bowman, Ben Kamisar, and Scott Bland of NBC News reported tonight that Musk spent at least $250 million to get Trump elected. In addition to the $20.5 million to the RBG PAC, he put $238 million into the America PAC. Musk also supported Trump through free advertising and commentary on his social media platform X.

Today provided a snapshot of American society that echoed a similar moment on January 6, 1872, when Edward D. Stokes shot railroad baron James Fisk Jr. as he descended the staircase of New York’s Grand Central Hotel. The quarrel was over Fisk’s mistress, Josie, who had taken up with the handsome Stokes, but the murder instantly provoked a popular condemnation of the ties between big business and government.

Fisk was a rich, flamboyant, and unscrupulous man-about-town, who was deeply entwined both with railroad barons like Jay Gould, Daniel Drew, and Cornelius Vanderbilt and with New York’s Tammany Hall political machine and its infamous leader, William Marcy Tweed. Tweed made sure the laws benefited the railroads and, the papers noted, snuck into the hotel to say goodbye to his friend in the hours it took for him to perish.

After the Civil War, most Americans applauded the nation’s businessmen for the support their growing industries had provided to the Union, but by 1872 the enormous fortunes the railroad men had amassed had tarnished their reputation. At the same time, big operators were starting to squeeze smaller enterprises out of business in order to control the markets, and popular anger simmered over their increasing control of the economy.

Stokes’s shooting was the event that sparked a popular rebellion. Newspapers covered every minute of the event and Fisk’s demise, while sensational books about the murder rolled off the presses.

Together, they redefined late nineteenth-century industrialists, with one painting Fisk as a representative businessman who with just “an hour’s effort,” could “gather into his clutches a score of millions of other people’s property, impoverish a thousand wealthy men, or derange the values and the traffic of a vast empire.”

Both those covering the murder and those reading about it rejoiced in Fisk’s misfortune.