Donald Trump has cancelled the Pentagon’s plan to livestream Nidal Hasan’s execution after an outcry from Republicans and Democrats alike. Yet the former US Army psychiatrist, convicted of murdering 12 soldiers and a civilian at Fort Hood in 2009, is still scheduled to face a firing squad on 3 December. If it goes ahead, it will be the US military’s first execution since 1961.
The prospect of broadcasting the killing provoked a political backlash. The decision to kill him remains intact.
Under the current Trump administration, one might think we have seen it all, that hardly anything can shock us. Yet almost every day, the US rulers seem to raise the threshold of what the ‘civilised world’ can tolerate, commit to and advocate.
I did not see the proposed return to public executions coming. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth wanted an audience for the military’s next killing; Trump has decided that the public will not be allowed to watch.
American killing machine
As an opponent of capital punishment, I see no crime that requires transforming an execution into entertainment potentially available to millions, including children. But the removal of a camera should not be mistaken for a retreat from state violence.
While the military is preparing to resume executions after a 65-year hiatus, we must remember that the wider American killing machine never went away in the first place.
Individual jurisdictions have abolished capital punishment or suspended its use, but the machinery remains operational. In 2024, 25 people were executed and 47 in 2025, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre.
Beyond execution chambers, the toll is far greater. According to Campaign Zero’s Mapping Police Violence project, US police killed at least 1,314 people in 2025, an average of 3.6 every day. Even that horrifying toll represented a 5% decline from 2024, the first annual decrease in six years.
Black people were still 2.6 times as likely as white people to be killed. These figures cover police killings in many different circumstances, rather than judicial executions. But they demolish any suggestion that lethal state violence had taken a holiday.
Then there are the deaths without execution warrants or guns. A 2023 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine associated poverty with approximately 183,000 US deaths in 2019. Another study, following people identified as homeless in the 2010 census, found that those under 65 faced 3.5 times the mortality risk of housed people after accounting for demographic and geographical differences. Researchers also estimated that more than two million deaths during the 2020 and 2021 pandemic years could have been avoided if US mortality rates had matched those in 21 other wealthy countries.
Poverty, inadequate housing and denial of healthcare are silent mass killers whose victims are unlikely to make headlines or front-page news. This is structural violence, with political responsibility resting on US elites, which is otherwise conveniently obscured.
America today
Political choices shape access to treatment, decent housing, safe work, and adequate food. The ruling US elites have repeatedly subordinated those needs to profit. By all accounts, today’s America is a social Darwinist experiment on steroids. The poor are poor because they deserve it. The sick die because they cannot afford treatment, so what?
The state must not intervene to provide protection because, God forbid, that would be socialism. The cruelty is routinely dressed up as individual responsibility and economic common sense.
Trump’s administration brings a more openly vindictive politics to this inheritance. Racism, misogyny, and xenophobia feed its vocabulary of hierarchy. Take, for example, Trump’s language about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country. Once people are represented as contamination, cruelty toward them becomes easier to sell as national renewal. Across the country, masked ICE agents are snatching foreigners, breaking up families, and shooting protesters in the name of the law.
Abroad, the same entitlement assumes imperial proportions. US forces seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in January. Trump entertained taking Greenland by force before ruling out military action at Davos. The US and Israel launched another war against Iran in February. Kidnapping a foreign president, treating another people’s territory as an acquisition, and promising salvation through bombardment revive the prerogatives of nineteenth-century colonialism.
Hegseth, who proposed the latest live-streamed execution, gives this politics a crusading aesthetic. The civilian Pentagon chief bears a Jerusalem Cross and “Deus Vult” tattoos, and has promoted conservative Christianity inside the military. His church network is associated with a patriarchal Christian nationalism. Its prominent pastor, Doug Wilson, advocates postmillennialism, envisioning Christian rule before Christ’s return. This combination of religious supremacy and military power gives the execution proposal a particularly ominous setting.
Michel Foucault helps us understand the relationship between public punishment and less visible forms of coercion. In Discipline and Punish, he argues that public execution was a ritual through which the ruling authority reasserted itself. But the retreat of the scaffold did not make punishment humane.
Power changed its methods, working through prisons, institutions and everyday routines. Live-streaming Hasan’s execution would have created a power spectacle. Does the cancellation mean a return to rationality? Not necessarily. It leaves the coercive institutions and their authority in place.
Hegseth’s supporters have presented the execution as a warning to would-be killers. The argument for deterrence, however, lacks empirical support. Existing research cannot provide any conclusions on whether capital punishment increased, decreased, or had no effect on homicide.
American rulers preside over death through several different mechanisms: execution orders, armed policing, policies that leave millions vulnerable to preventable illness and poverty, and wars waged abroad. A society cannot claim to respect human life while treating so much death as acceptable, unavoidable or even exemplary.
The self-proclaimed enlightened world should be judged by the lives it protects and the power it restrains. Trump can cancel the livestream. The machinery behind it remains.
Hossam el-Hamalawy is an Egyptian scholar-activist in Germany, focusing on the military, policing, and labour.
Follow Hossam on X: @3arabawy
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab.
