Last week, defense secretary and former TV personality Pete Hegseth shocked the world when he announced that the upcoming execution by firing squad of a mass shooter would be livestreamed online — an unfathomable act of cruelty for all to see.
Nidal Hasan, a former army psychiatrist, killed 13 people at the Fort Hood US Army post in Texas in 2009. The plans for broadcasting the killing came just days after officials failed to end the life of Christa Pike, who had been on death row for decades.
But now, even president Donald Trump is seemingly growing wary of the damning optics of televising a brutal execution in the weeks leading up to the midterm elections — which would’ve been the first execution by military firing squad in the United States since November 1945 and the country’s first public execution since 1936.
In a rambling Thursday post on Truth Social, Trump said that while broadcasting the murder would serve as a “strong deterrent,” “many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device.”
