• Trump says it’s “terrible” that some admire Luigi Mangione, the UHC CEO shooting suspect.
• “This is actually a disease,” Trump said.
• He speculated that some of the public reaction to the shooting was “fake news.”

President-elect Donald Trump commented Monday on the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the upgrading of suspect Luigi Mangione.

“I think it’s really terrible that some people seem to admire him,” Trump told reporters at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago.

“That was a terrible thing. It was cold-blooded. Just a cold-blooded, terrible murder,” Trump said of the murder.

While a wide range of politicians have condemned the shooting, some progressive Democrats have also used the moment to take stock of Americans’ frustration with the health care industry, as the public reaction to the shooting has not been uniformly negative.

“Of course we don’t want to see the chaos that vigilantism brings,” Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York told Business Insider last week. “We also don’t want to experience the extreme suffering that millions of Americans face when their lives change overnight after a terrible diagnosis, leading people to some of the worst events, not just health events, but also the worst financial ones “Events of her life” and the life of her family.”

Trump said Monday he was stunned by the public reaction and suggested some of it was fake.

“How people can like this guy is…that’s actually a disease,” Trump said. “Maybe it’s fake news, I don’t know. It’s hard to believe that one can even think of it, but it seems that there is some desire for him. I don’t understand it.”