Several Republicans have broken with President Donald Trump over the Pentagon’s plan to livestream the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement earlier this week that the military would livestream the execution prompted a backlash from lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle. Democrats expressed overwhelming opposition, and retiring North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis called the plan to livestream the execution “beyond disgusting.” Vice President JD Vance cast doubt on whether the execution would actually be livestreamed, but said that he would not watch if it is.
Trump told reporters on Friday that he had personally approved of the Pentagon’s decision to livestream the execution. But earlier, when asked whether he wanted the execution livestreamed and whether he was concerned the footage could be used as propaganda, he said: “Well, they’re making a determination about that, but he will be killed.” But he said Hasan deserved to be executed by firing squad. And I think that the death penalty is a very worthy way of going for him,” he said.
Austin Sarat, a professor at Amherst College who has written extensively about the death penalty, previously told Newsweek that while death by firing squad is “always brutal,” livestreaming the execution “will turn that brutality into a spectacle of cruelty.” “Live-streaming will not educate," Sarat added. "It will terrorize and is beneath the dignity that we owe to anyone, even those who commit the kind of horrific crime that Nidal Hasan did.” Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment via an email sent outside regular business hours. The outrage over the plan comes amid fresh scrutiny over how the death penalty is carried out in the United States following the botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee.
Here, Newsweek lists all the Republicans who have spoken out against the plan to livestream Hasan’s execution. Beyond disgusting," Tillis wrote on X. He added: "Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do.
It should not be happening in America.” Curtis warned that livestreaming the execution risked cultivating an appetite for executions as entertainment as he urged Hegseth to reconsider the plan. A civilization erodes when it cultivates an appetite for executions as a form of entertainment,” the Utah senator wrote on X. The victims deserve justice administered with solemnity.
Broadcasting a death diminishes us and is not an effective deterrent. I urge him to reconsider.” Kennedy said on Friday that he would not televise or publicize the execution. But there are arguments, you know, on both sides.” “I absolutely support the sentence of death, but live-streaming executions is what jihadists do.
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