President Donald J. Trump salutes military personnel as he disembarks Air Force One at to Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth in Texas, Oct. 17, 2019, (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
President Donald Trump has been celebrating the idea of his firing squad punishment for the Fort Hood shooter, and that dream looks to be falling apart amid growing scandals.
General Mark Hertling and former prosecutor Margaret Donovan joined Ben Parker for The Bulwark's "Command Post" podcast Wednesday, noting reporting this week that Trump is now wavering on having Nidal Malik Hasan put to death by firing squad.
Trump appears to be imagining a movie in which a defiant strongman stands before the squad and is taken down by the U.S. military. Both Donovan and Hertling noted that Hasan is a 60-year-old man who is paralyzed from the chest down. He can't walk. He can't stand. And if they intend to shoot him, he'll likely be sitting in a wheelchair.
According to CBS News, Trump now understands that the optics don't seem to be what he wants.
Hertling pointed out that the other risk is that Hasan is trying to paint himself "as a martyr for his religion. Killing the infidels. So, this would only contribute to that view of him as a martyr. You know, the president suggested he might change his mind because he found out the guy was in a wheelchair? That also gives an indicator of a lack of the entire case by our leaders that are making this decision."
Both he and Donovan recalled specific Army regulation (190-55) that outlines how executions are carried out for military prisoners. Donovan explained that there's also a logistical nightmare of trying to have a certified place to carry out an execution since Fort Hood is not a location where they do that. They typically execute prisoners at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.
So, the question she had was whether the cost and logistics of doing everything properly were worth something that is nothing more than theater for Trump.
"If it's all for theater, is that fear going to be appropriated by somebody else? Because I'm pretty sure it is. That's kind of the whole thing about how particularly soon extremists recruit each other," Donovan said.
Several Army units are at Fort Hood, so Hertling asked whether they'll require military members to watch the execution as part of the theater. Will those who carry out the shooting be trained to carry this out, since there are no members of the military who've done this?
"But most importantly, how much of a moral injury is this going to contribute to?" the retired general asked. "Because if you ask one of the last firing squad executions in the military was Private Eddie Slovik in 1945. And in that execution they had a rack of rifles with 12 rifles on it, and it depends on the regulation on it, but one in four of those have blank rounds in it. So, a soldier who's firing at the individual could claim deniability of being actually being the one who murdered him."
His second point, he said, is that if these military members "intend to use M-16 or M-4 rifles with a 556 caliber bullet that travels at 29 feet per second when it exits the chamber, it is going to rip that body up. And to have that kind of gore and horrific action on a live stream is just contrary to everything I think we aspire to be as a nation."
Donovan agreed, adding that it's an extremely violent way to die and it is again another reason not to make Hasan a celebrity.
She pivoted to comments about Trump's obsession with turning everything into World War II and the ethos and heroism that surrounds it. Trump has recently decided to create expensive ships in his "Golden Fleet" that don't follow the latest designs the military has spent decades perfecting. Instead, he wants them to look like World War II ships. The firing squad idea is also what Trump said was once done in World War II.
This fantasy that Trump has, Donovan said, basically negates everything about the realities of that war, in which the top leaders from that war came together afterward to outline a set of rules, treaties, agreements and laws that would prevent another war like that.
Parker chimed in, saying that for all of Trump's WW2 obsessions, he's ignoring a key piece of that war: the draft, which required participation from all American men, not just 1 percent of them.