President Donald Trump has privately expressed his distaste for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream the firing squad execution of Fort Hood gunman Nidal Hasan.
Axios reported Monday that the president “didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic” about the plan, which Democrats and Republicans alike have panned as heinous and barbaric. Trump told another aide that it “might not happen.”
This is a 180 for the president, who was all-in on the public execution just last week. “Absolutely, I approved,” he said then.
Now, after a wave of bipartisan backlash, that tune has changed.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Senator Thom Tillis, and Representative Adam Scott were a few of the Republicans who also expressed their opposition to livestreaming Hasan’s execution.
“The concern would be that it would create a video that would be a recruiting tool for future terrorists,” Johnson said in a CBS News interview over the weekend. “I wouldn’t be watching it if it was aired.… [but] that’s outside of my lane of course.”.
“But I need to tell the White House what some of my colleagues think about that, and not everybody’s in favor of the idea.”
“Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting,” Senator Thom Tillis said Thursday. “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”
“I absolutely support the sentence of death, but live-streaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that,” Representative Adam Scott chimed in the next day.
Hasan, a 56-year-old former Army psychiatrist from Virginia, killed 13 soldiers and wounded 32 others when he attacked the Texas military post in 2009. His execution date is set for December 3.