Today, Explained - Trump v. Mangione

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

The Trump administration is seeking the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, who is scheduled back in court this week. Plus, a closer look at a work that may have inspired Mangione (the Unabomber’s manifesto). This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Jolie Myers, fact checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Luigi Mangione appearing at a February hearing for the murder of UHC CEO Brian Thompson. Photo by Curtis Means - Pool/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Luigi Mangione is supposed to be back in court on Friday and court looks different when Luigi shows up. Luigi! Luigi! The last time that I was in court with him, there were so many members of the public that wanted to be inside the courtroom and so many of them were young women. Mangione has a fan club. People outside with signs, people inside lining up. I mean sometimes for a really long time to just want to get into the courtroom to see him. It's just a different experience than the people that you are typically seeing. Put the system on trial!

What'll be different this week is that it'd be the first time Mangione appeared since the federal government, the Justice Department, Pam Bondi, Donald Trump have said they would like to seek the death penalty in this case. We're gonna ask how that's gonna go over in New York on Today Explained. Okay, Martin, let's try one. Remember, big. You got it. The Ford It's a Big Deal event is on. How's that? A little bigger.

The Ford It's a Big Deal event. Nice. Now the offer? Lease a 2025 Escape Active all-wheel drive from 198 bi-weekly at 1.99% APR for 36 months with $27.55 down. Wow, that's like $99 a week. Yeah, it's a big deal. The Ford It's a Big Deal event. Visit your Toronto area Ford store or Ford.ca today. Megan Rapinoe here.

This week on A Touch More, we open up the mailbag and answer your burning questions. And we have a great conversation with two-time Olympic medalist Lauren Holliday about the business of women's sports and how to support and grow the next generation of female athletes. Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Today Explained, Sean Roms from here with Samantha Max from Gothamus. Samantha, you've been covering Luigi Mangione since we found out about Luigi Mangione. He's scheduled to be in federal court tomorrow. What can you tell us about what we can expect from this hearing? Well, Mangione is facing a few different cases. Two here in New York, also one in Pennsylvania where he was arrested.

The 26 year old faces five charges in Pennsylvania, including forgery and possession of a gun without a license. In New York, he has already been indicted in state court. Mangione was indicted on charges that included murder as an act of terrorism. The 26-year-old pleaded not guilty. In federal court, what's gonna be happening is he has been charged, but he hasn't actually been indicted. So the case would theoretically advance to another level where he could be indicted after a grand jury had considered the allegations against him.

And then he actually has not entered a plea in his federal case. So he would be probably entering a plea if he were indicted. Why has he not yet been indicted federally? Do we know? That's a really good question that is not totally clear at this point, honestly. Every month for the last few months now,

the government has asked for an extra 30 days to decide whether or not they're going to bring an indictment. And we know Pam Bondi came out and said that Mangione will be facing the death penalty in this federal case. Is that right? So she has directed prosecutors in New York City to seek the death penalty. Bondi calling the killing a premeditated cold blooded assassination and an act of political violence. If there was ever a death case, this is one.

This guy is charged with hunting down a CEO, a father of two, a married man, hunting him down and executing him. I mean, this whole case is a bit unprecedented. And as we have seen with several other federal cases, since the Trump administration has taken office, that they're not exactly always following the typical protocols. Mangione's attorneys have filed papers challenging this request to seek the death penalty, calling out Pam Bondi for putting out this press release where they said that she didn't make it clear enough, that these are only allegations, that he is presumed innocent. And actually in the government's response

they were saying well it's way too early for the defense to be you know making a stink about the fact that there's this directive to seek the death penalty because we haven't even sought it yet we haven't even indicted him yet but of course none of that would have been happening if it weren't for the Attorney General putting out this press release also making an Instagram post saying that she wants the death penalty for Mangione. What was the Instagram post like? I'm afraid I missed it. It's like a pull quote from yeah from the press release but then she actually went on Fox News and she was saying I was receiving death threats

for seeking the death penalty on someone who was charged with an execution of a CEO. We're going to continue to do the right thing. We're not going to be deterred. The president's directive was very clear. We are to seek the death penalty when possible. Is the state of New York taking issue with the call for death penalty? Because I believe in New York state, they do not execute prisoners anymore. Yeah?

Well, the state actually, I mean, they have no say really on what punishment the federal government does or doesn't seek. You know, the federal government, they're going by federal law and they can do what they want. And even the crimes that Mangione is accused of are pretty different from one to the other. In the state case, he's facing murder charges and actually terrorism charges.

In the federal case, he's facing stalking charges, charges that he stalked this healthcare executive across state lines and killed him. So it's two different theories here. New York state does not seek the death penalty anymore in its state cases. The highest court in New York has found that it is against the state's constitution, but in federal law, the death penalty is still allowed. It is still sought.

I actually covered a federal death penalty case here in New York City brought by the same prosecutor's office. That was for a man named Saifullo Saipov a few years ago. At least eight people are dead and 11 more injured after that pickup truck plowed through a busy bicycle path along the West Side Highway. Prosecutors say Saifullo Saipov smiled while talking to investigators and even asked to fly an ISIS flag in his hospital room after allegedly using his truck as a weapon to mow down people on a bike path in 2017, allegedly telling investigators his goal was to kill as many people as possible

in order to become a member of ISIS. In that case, he was convicted, but there was this separate part of the trial where a jury then had to decide whether to give him the death penalty. And it has to be a unanimous decision. It's this whole long process. And in the end, they could not come to unanimous decision to give him the death penalty. So he was instead sentenced to life in a federal prison. And this was a mass murderer with fealty to ISIS that a jury could not decide to put to

death. Does that mean it's not very likely that Luigi Mangione, an alleged murderer who killed, allegedly, one person who's received unprecedented amounts of letters and has a fan club showing up to court whenever he might be there, who's on the face of votive candles. Does that make it much less likely that that a New York jury is going to put him to death or does that remain to be seen? I mean, I think that's a really good question. In Saipov's case, that was an incredibly emotional trial. You had the loved ones of people who had been killed testifying, talking about just the tragic loss of their family members and friends. You actually had surviving victims that were testifying about these horrible injuries and traumas that were lingering. And even after all of that, that jury decided we are not going to

put this person to death. So for someone like Mangione, you know, I could only imagine what it would be like for a jury to be making that type of decision. As you've said, he has garnered so much public support. The Ivy League grad has received an outpouring of support and hundreds of thousands in donations to his legal fund. The Manhattan DA called anybody who supports Luigi extreme activists and a lawless mob. Very strong words coming out of the Manhattan DA just because we're tired of being bullied by CEOs. Are we supposed to hate this guy? Just ask for a jury trial, Luigi. Ask for a jury trial.

It's like everyone's behind you, bro. Except for the overlords, except for the CEOs, obviously. Though of course, a few things. I mean, one, this is one of these cases where it's always the question of how much is what's on the internet real life. And just because our perception of, you know, public opinion might be one thing because of how things are playing out on the internet, we don't know what it would be like for a jury, which first of all, juries aren't always totally representative of society. It's a very particular group of people that is available to come to jury service and able

to sit on what would likely be a very lengthy trial. But also, if this case does eventually go to trial, if there is eventually a death penalty phase, that will be a long time from now. These cases are very complex. They take a long time to get through all of the investigating, building the case, putting everything together. So we don't know how public sentiment will change between then and now. You can follow Samantha Max's coverage of Luigi Mangione at Gothamist.com. Last year, Mangione went on Goodreads to leave a review. He wrote,

It's easy to quickly write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies, but it's simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out. He was writing about the Unabomber's Manifesto and we are going to talk about the enduring influence of that text when we return on Today Explained. exclusive NHL and PWHL players and retired legends. Collect them all only at Tim's, at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. Do you eat food? Three times the points.

Do you go anywhere? Three times the points. Do you stream stuff? Three times the points. Well then, get the RBC ION Plus Visa and earn three times the points at grocery stores and restaurants, as well as on gas, EV charging, daily transit, streaming services, digital gaming and more, all the time.

Get the RBC ION Plus Visa. Conditions apply. Visit rbc.com slash ion cards. Hi, folks. This is Kara Swisher. This week on my podcast, On with Kara Swisher, I'm speaking with philanthropist, business woman and women's rights advocate, Melinda French Gates, on how she's refocused after her divorce from tech mogul, Bill Gates.

We talk about why investing in women in politics and business is playing the long and smart game and we discuss her new memoir, The Next Day. My mom used to say to me as I was growing up, set your own agenda or someone else will. I know society is better off when women are in positions of power. I really enjoy this conversation because it's an interesting moment where women in technology are having much more of an important impact than men who are still moving fast and breaking things. Have a listen to On with Kara Swisher wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to Today Explained.

So I stumbled across it on this reading list and I put it aside to read on the weekend and I expected to be kind of perversely amused by the insane conspiratorial ravings of a madman, like an anti-tech Charles Manson, I suppose. And then I read it, and what struck me is how unconspiratorial it was. Kaczynski doesn't think there's an evil cabal of technocrats plotting to oppress us all. His entire worldview is evolutionary. And so I thought this is interesting as political theory. It's extremely radical and there's a lot I disagree with, but as a historian of political ideas, I thought it would make an interesting side project. And then it took on a life of its own.

Sean Fleming is a research fellow at the University of Nottingham. Lately, he's been doing research on industrial society and its future by one Theodore Kaczynski. He's better known as the Unabomber. The text is better known as the Unabomber's Manifesto. We reached out to him to ask how it may have influenced Luigi Mangione. Well, I guess I wanna be careful what I say about the relationship between Mangione and Kaczynski,

and also what I say about Mangione in general. He hasn't been convicted of anything yet. And I haven't seen any hard evidence that Mangione was inspired by Kaczynski, but there are some interesting parallels. So assassinating corporate executives to create a media spectacle is straight out of the Unabomber's playbook. The assassin of Brian Thompson also left some engravings on the shell casings, which reminds me of the engravings that Kaczynski left on the components of his bombs. And more generally, Kaczynski and Mangione are both disaffected overachievers with backgrounds in STEM fields. So whether or not Mangione was actually inspired by Kaczynski, he's precisely the sort of

person who's likely to find the Unabomber's ideology compelling. For those who don't remember, who was he, what did he do, and how did people come to know him? Ted Kaczynski was born in Chicago in 1942, and he started out as a child prodigy in mathematics. He went to Harvard at the age of 16, and then he went on to do a PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan. He was then hired as an assistant professor in math at Berkeley, and at that time he was the youngest in the institution's history. But after two years at Berkeley, he abruptly resigned, and after a little while he bought himself a piece of land outside Lincoln, Montana, where he built himself a one-room cabin, 10 feet by 12 feet, with no

electricity or running water. And from there he launched his one-man war against modern technology. Another bombing is making the news tonight. The one-time mathematics prodigy played a deadly cat and mouse game with the FBI in a nationwide bombing campaign that stretched nearly two decades. So the reason we're still talking about Kaczynski is that he managed to blackmail the media into publishing his writings. So in April 1995, he sent a letter to the New York Times promising that he would stop bombing if his 35,000 word essay titled Industrial

Society and Its Future were published in the Times or some other major newspaper. So the manifesto was published in the Washington Post on September 19th 1995. Which I think is hard to imagine today, but hundreds of thousands of Americans were mailed a terrorist's manifesto. Yes, that's right. Without exaggeration, it might be one of the most read manifestos since the communist manifesto. It was soon after published in paperback.

It was also uploaded to Time Warner's Pathfinder platform. So it became what might be the first ever internet manifesto. And it's set the template for the manifestos that have become all too common in the aftermath of violent attacks. And it's very readable. It's got this sort of numbered format where the whole thing is broken down into categories with these sort of points made in every category. It's not the hardest read in the world. It isn't the scrawlings of a madman. It's the

ordered philosophy of a terrorist. He writes that we aren't the first to mention that the world today seems to be going crazy. This sort of thing is not normal for human societies. There is good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern man is. I think a lot of people could find some truth in that statement. What was he trying to get across with this manifesto? In the passage you've just quoted, what he's arguing is basically that human beings are biologically maladapted to the modern world.

This is a big claim from evolutionary psychology. The argument is that,ologically speaking we're still Stone Age hunter-gatherers. We evolved hunting large animals on the savanna and in the span of just 10,000 years, a blink in evolutionary time, we've constructed this world of concrete, steel, and screens. So Kaczynski argues that because of this we suffer from depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance abuse, and so many other psychological pathologies that so-called primitive human beings do not.

And what's his solution? His solution is to destroy all modern technology and return ourselves to a more primitive condition, to crash out of the modern world. So basically what he envisions is a group of anti-tech revolutionaries sabotaging the electric grid, blowing up the gas pipelines, attacking the nervous system, so to speak, of modern society and plunging us back into,

if not the Stone Age, then something like small scale agriculture and a shepherd society. How was this manifesto received in the 90s when it was published by the Washington Post and delivered to, you know, front porches around the country? Well, there was a lot of debate about it, but overall the reception of the manifesto was shockingly sympathetic. Many journalists treated Kaczynski as a serious intellectual, and many members of the public, in letters to the editor and on talk radio shows, hailed him as a folk hero. He was often described as a modern-day Thoreau. So, from 1995 through about 1997, he was hailed as this philosopher of the counterculture.

But then in 1998, during his legal proceedings, a psychiatrist labeled him a paranoid schizophrenic and portrayed his ideology as a sort of bundle of delusions. And the media took her word for it, and so did the public to a large extent. So Kaczynski fell out of fashion from the late 90s until the early 2010s. But then he was rediscovered as concerns about climate change, artificial intelligence, and the consequences of digital immersion became so much more salient. And his warnings about the negative consequences of modern technology began to seem prophetic to many people.

So there's been a Unabomber revival. -♪ MUSIC PLAYING CONTINUES...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY...DEEPLY... So, who are the types of people who are glomming on to this manifesto? This too has changed significantly over time. So during the Unabomber mania of the mid-1990s, Kaczynski gained a following on the radical left, especially among green anarchists. But he's returned to cultural prominence with the opposite political valence. So today he's seen more as a figure of the right. As you may have noticed, he spends the first 3,000 words of his manifesto railing against leftism. And in the context of the culture war in the 2010s, conservatives rediscovered him and rehabilitated him and co-opted him

onto their side in the culture war. So Kaczynski has now been appropriated by neo-Nazis, eco-fascists, far-right accelerationists, a ragbag of people on the right who are drawn to his critique of leftism. Which is so interesting because Luigi Mangione has been hailed as something of a hero on the left, right? How is it that Kaczynski appeals to a figure like Mangione but also neo-Nazis? What makes Kaczynski appealing to so many different sorts of radicals is that he defies easy categorization. And this makes his ideology sort of like an a la carte menu of ideas. So different radicals and reactionaries latch on to different aspects of his ideology. So for instance, green anarchists were enthralled with his critique of technology, while neo-Nazis,

generally speaking, ignore the critique of technology and focus solely on the critique of leftism. This man ultimately is advocating for murder, if not mass murder, to achieve his aims. Does he ever show any remorse for that? No, he doesn't. He doesn't show any remorse for the people he killed in his bombings. He says they're not innocent. At one point, he says the people who are responsible for the advancement of technology are worse

than Stalin, worse than Hitler. What they're doing to humanity is even more grotesque, he says. But he does acknowledge that his anti-tech revolution would kill millions, if not billions of people. This is an extremely apocalyptic vision. And even though his vision is apocalyptic, it was hugely influential and continues to be significantly influential.

Many people read the manifesto and think, well, that's a good point. That's an interesting insight. But when he starts talking about revolution, it's so omnicidal that it's impossible for most of us to take seriously. Many people accept the argument up until the point where he suggests that we should blow up the electric grid and knock ourselves back to the Stone Age. In other words, many people accept parts of his diagnosis of the problems with the modern world, but they're completely unwilling to take his prescription seriously. seriously. In the 90s, he looked like a one-off. He could easily be dismissed as an isolated crank with a sort of idiosyncratic ideology.

But in the 2020s, it looks like the world's caught up with him. And I think as concerns about the negative consequences of modern technology become especially acute. I think it will become increasingly likely that others will follow in Kaczynski's footsteps. Sean Fleming, University of Nottingham, famous for its sheriff. Hadi Mawagdi made our show today. Jolie Meyers edited. Laura Bullard fact-checked. Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christen's daughter mixed. This today explained. you