On Thursday, October 8, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that the execution of Major Nidal Hasan, a former U.S. Army psychiatrist who shot and killed 12 soldiers and one civilian and wounded 32 others in a terrorist attack at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009, would be livestreamed. Hasan will be executed by firing squad on December 3.
One week later, after widespread public backlash, Trump reversed course. The execution by firing squad will still take place, but it will not be livestreamed. The reversal is welcome — but it should not be reassuring.
This will still be the first military execution in 65 years. Had it been broadcast, it would also have been the first public execution in the United States since 1936, when a young Black man named Rainey Bethea was hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky after being convicted of raping an elderly White woman.
An estimated 20,000 people watched his execution. It was a festive gathering. People ate candy, drank soda, and adults put children on their shoulders to give them a better view of the killing of Rainey Bethea and his Black body. It was a public ritual that enforced a White supremacist social and political order.
Ninety years later, Rainey Bethea and Nidal Hasan could hardly be more different: a young Black man hanged in the Jim Crow South and a convicted mass murderer and terrorist. What connects their stories is the spectacle the Trump administration proposed: a human being killed before an audience.
Nidal Hasan murdered 13 people in a premeditated act of violence. I believe, in principle, that the death penalty should be used as the ultimate punishment for the most unconscionable crimes. Hasan’s actions certainly meet that standard.
But Hasan’s public execution would have been a barbaric act, a grotesque spectacle. It would also have advanced Hasan’s cause by making him a martyr and a hero to Islamist terrorists.
Most important, a public execution would have been another act of moral debasement and cruelty in the Age of Trump and American fascism.
Amnesty International reports that only two countries — Iran and Afghanistan — carried out documented public executions in 2025. Trump and Hegseth were willing to have “the world’s greatest democracy” join that ignominious company.
Religious groups, including the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, condemned the decision to publicly broadcast Hasan’s execution. The conference’s president, Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, expressed “shock and great sorrow.”
“In no way can Hasan's actions be condoned, but this decision is a barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered…. The public execution even of one who has done grave harm will only further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people,” he told Vatican News.
Of course, there are sadists, the morally empty, and other deeply disturbed people who would relish the chance to watch another human being shot to death.
When asked about the public execution, Hegseth told a right-wing “news” outlet that it was a “no-brainer.” On Friday, Trump told reporters that he “absolutely” approved of the decision and said Hasan deserved to be killed by firing squad. The next day, he told reporters that he would soon make the ultimate decision about whether the execution would be broadcast live.
On Thursday, October 15, Trump announced on Truth Social that the execution would not be livestreamed:
I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but, many very good and well-meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device. He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed. That said, the execution may be viewed in person by the immediate families of the victims, if they so choose. They deserve to witness JUSTICE!
Trump’s change of mind appears to reflect concerns about the optics — Hasan is paralyzed from the waist down and uses a wheelchair — and about public outcry so close to the midterm elections.
To that point, a new ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll found that 80% of Americans — including 64% of Republicans — oppose livestreaming the execution of Nidal Hasan. Vice President JD Vance said he would not watch the execution if it were livestreamed. Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican, called the plan "beyond disgusting," and Rep. Austin Scott said live streaming executions is what jihadists do.
The backlash worked. But it would be a great error to read Trump’s reversal as a change of heart.
Trump did not suddenly develop a conscience or deeply rooted moral objections to the death penalty. His deep attraction to violence has not changed. Trump still loves the idea of executing people by firing squad.
During a rally in Bullhead City, Arizona on Wednesday, Trump said that people who “leak” information to the news media should be shot. He then attacked journalists, saying they are “almost as bad” as leakers and that “they leak false information. That makes them a leaker, right?”
On Wednesday, Trump also shared videos showing tigers and other animals mauling people. One of those videos showed William Chapman, a former child actor, being mauled to death by a tiger last Saturday after entering its enclosure at Yorkshire Wildlife Park, which is located in the United Kingdom. The words “Don’t ever mess with nature! President DJT” appear at the end of the footage.
Chapman’s family told reporters that he had struggled with mental illness.
Trump later posted an AI-generated video depicting himself frolicking and play-fighting with the same tiger that attacked Chapman. In the video, Trump mimics a gesture Chapman made while the tiger was attacking him. The video ends with Trump and the tiger hugging. The message is plain: Trump wants to be seen as a predator even tigers respect.
Not satisfied with videos of people being mauled by animals, Trump on Wednesday shared a video on social media depicting presumably “illegal aliens” being put on deportation flights and sent to foreign gulags, including the infamous CECOT, the notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, where detainees have been subjected to torture and other extreme abuse. The caption reads: “This is where we send our killers, drug dealers, and thugs.” Trump does not specify whether the people in the videos are “illegal aliens.” Trump has also said that he would “love” to send violent American criminals to CECOT and other foreign prisons.
In an email about Hasan’s public execution, Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist, editor of the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, and one of the world’s leading experts on violence, shared her concerns about Trump’s apparently intensifying attraction to violence and what she sees as his worsening pathology:
Live-streamed public executions by firing squads may seem like shocking new violence, but they are the exact extension of the president's dangerous mindset we have been warning against. The lack of love in childhood that had translated into the need for adulation of crowds, has now transformed into the need to instill fear and terror.
In what has become a familiar refrain during the long Age of Trump, the announcement of Hasan’s public execution prompted the chorus: “This is not who we are!” “Enough is enough!” and “This is shocking! Even for Donald Trump.” Relief at Trump’s reversal risks fueling the same denial, naivete and complacency.
In reality, America is a profoundly violent country.
It was founded on the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Black people. The United States has been at war or in a state of armed conflict for most of its existence. It is currently fighting an undeclared war against Iran. President Trump has repeatedly threatened to annihilate Iran and its people. Carrying out that threat could constitute a crime against humanity and genocide.
The Equal Justice Initiative’s landmark report estimates that at least 4,400 Black Americans were lynched between the end of Reconstruction and 1950. This is a low estimate. Some historians and other experts put the number of Black Americans killed by White racial violence during the same period in the tens of thousands.
The United States is awash in guns. There are more guns than people.
We are one of the few countries where school children routinely practice hiding from mass shooters. Instead of treating gun violence as a public health emergency — nearly 50,000 people died from firearm injuries in 2023 — America’s leaders respond with empty “hopes and prayers.”
The country’s popular culture is rife with violence. Public health experts estimate that by age 18, the average American child has seen approximately 200,000 acts of violence on television alone.
Why a public execution?
The public execution of Nidal Hasan would have done more than punish an evil man. It would have been to intimidate and emotionally train the American people to become ideal authoritarian subjects.
Lee warned that, “far from deterring crime, such a [public execution] by the Trump administration will actually accelerate crime, as it weaponizes state power into an instrument of coercive social control.”
She added:
The performative spectacle of power will also dismantle norms by demonstrating very graphically that it can subvert any existing order, as well as strip its "victims" of any dignity by subjecting them to barbaric, dehumanizing treatment.
It traumatizes and desensitizes the general population, while those who already have a violent mindset or traumatic psychology will be further prepared for orgies of violence, either by engaging in them, permitting them through identification with the aggressor, or retreating into total submission and learned helplessness.
I have continued to emphasize that there will be no end to this spiral of violence, until external restraints are applied. It is time we recognize that an intervention is necessary, and that none of us will be safe until all are safe.
In a post on social media, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who is a leading expert on fascism, echoed Lee’s warnings about the underlying logic behind the Trump administration’s proposal to execute Nidal Hasan publicly:
This is an escalation of an attempt to normalize extreme violence, ritualize violence, militarize the country, and make violence entertaining so when they ask you to commit violence in their name, you will be ready.
As I warned in a previous essay, by supporting Trump, tens of millions of Americans have chosen to define deviancy down and, in doing so, have elevated fascism, authoritarianism, and other antihuman forces that imperil the safety and future of the United States and the world.
Beyond the debates about the death penalty, the plan to publicly execute Nidal Hasan remains a symbolic warning about how debased American politics and culture have become in the Age of Trump.
In the end, Trump decided not to broadcast Hasan’s execution. This was not an act of conscience or nobility. It was a political calculation. The line between the acceptable and the unthinkable has been tested again. It held, but only because holding it became politically costly. The fascist tide keeps rising, but this time it was held back by public disgust.
Chauncey DeVega is a politics and opinion writer whose work considers American democracy, inequality, political power, and the enduring significance of race in American society and the wider world. He was formerly a senior politics writer at Salon. His essays and commentary have been cited by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC, NPR, The Atlantic, and other leading publications. He hosts two podcasts: The Chauncey DeVega Show and The Truth Report.
