The Martyrdom of Luigi Mangione

The Trump administration is doing everything it can to turn him into a saint.

Guy Smallman/Getty Images

I’ve written before about the weirdness surrounding the Cult of Luigi Mangione. I won’t bore you with the details (you can read it all here if you want) but in brief: I don’t love the idea of murdering people on a crowded city sidewalk, and I worry that focusing on Mangione himself distracts from addressing the larger, more pervasive grotesqueries perpetrated upon the public by the health insurance industry as a whole.

I mention all this because today, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced her office is seeking the death penalty for Magnione as part of “President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.” I won’t comment on the legal precedent for this kind of directive, or the likelihood that Mangione will face — to say nothing of actually be condemned to — the death penalty. I’m not a lawyer, or a legal scholar, or really anyone who has any business weighing in on technical arguments at work here (journalist Chris Geidner, on the other hand, is, and had plenty to say on Bluesky about the procedural moves and precedent at play here - tl;dr: it’s all extremely bad and self-serving). What I will say, though, is that I think the death penalty is immoral and bad in all cases, particularly when it’s being wielded by bona fide fascists like Bondi.

What I’ll also say is that if the MAGA faithful truly believe that applying the death penalty here is going to be to their ultimate benefit, then they’re dumber than I thought — and I already think they’re all pretty impressively dumb as it is. Let me explain why.