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President Donald Trump is reportedly asking advisors if he should go through with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream a military execution later this year.
Trump has publicly indicated that he’ll make a final decision on the matter soon.
“There are two thoughts: don’t show it and show it,” Trump said. “Because, you know, by showing it, maybe other people won’t be doing what he did.”
“I’ll make a decision ultimately. I know what the military would like to do, but I’ll make a decision,” Trump added.
But according to reporting from Axios, Trump is questioning whether the execution of former Army Maj. Nidal Hasan should be televised, asking his advisers for their views on the matter.
Hasan was convicted of killing 13 soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009. He was shot during the rampage, and is now a paraplegic, paralyzed from the waist down. Hasan is set to be executed by a firing squad in December.
The president “didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic” about a live, national showing of the execution, a source close to Trump said to the publication, adding that “he’s calling around, doing the Trump thing, asking people what they think.”
The livestream event “might not happen,” another source confirmed.
Trump’s public statements about the death penalty reveal that he has errant views about capital punishment. Multiple studies have shown that there is no evidence supporting the idea that the death penalty can act as a deterrent, or that the threat of capital punishment somehow lessens violent crime. Indeed, several years of data demonstrate that the homicide rates in states with capital punishment are higher than in states without the death penalty.
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Trump is also wrong about what “the military would like to do.” While there isn’t widespread data to demonstrate most servicemembers’ views one way or another, some officers have spoken out against the planned livestreaming of Hasan’s execution.
“It takes away everything America stands for when we do public executions,” one Army officer said in an anonymous comment to CNN. “The generational harm caused by allowing troops in uniform to stand in front of a man in a wheelchair and watch him get shot to death is irreparable.”
Several religious leaders, including Pope Leo, and a bipartisan cadre of lawmakers, have also spoken out against livestreaming the execution.
Despite Trump’s reticence about this specific event, he has been an outspoken proponent of expanding the death penalty, including for non-lethal crimes such as drug dealing. In his first week in office, he signed an executive order peddling the the false claim that the death penalty is “an essential tool for deterring” crimes, calling for the attorney general to seek the death penalty for crimes involving the killing of law enforcement officers, or when the defendant being charged is an undocumented immigrant.
In an op-ed published last week, Truthout’s board of directors president Maya Schenwar decried the death penalty in all of its forms, describing the botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee as an act of torture and Hegseth’s decision to livestream Hasan’s execution as part of a larger “pro-death penalty fervor.”
“The brutality is the point. The torture is the point. The murder, not only state-sanctioned but state-celebrated, is the very point,” Schenwar wrote.
She added:
A cohesive life-affirming agenda rejects not only executions, but also the inherent violence of incarceration, policing, deportation, imperial wars, and military aid to genocidal forces. It makes no excuses — let alone expansions — that prop up or prolong the existence of these institutions in ‘kinder, gentler’ forms.
“Let’s not allow ourselves to give in to the inertia of our brutal present, in which death by hanging is a mercy. Let’s envision the cohesive, life-affirming agenda that embraces a future for all of us, a world in which the torture of Christa Pike — or anyone — is unthinkable,” Schenwar concluded.
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