Trump Administration Still Debating Livestreaming a Public Execution

This regime still somehow manages to surprise me.

By: Austin Abbring

October 13, 2026

I really don't know what to say here besides that this is barbaric and archaic. The Trump administration, late last week, with the initial announcement via Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, has announced its intention to livestream the public execution of the Fort Bragg shooter, Nidal Hassan. He was sentenced to death in 2013 for the slaying of 13 people, primarily soldiers at the fort. I am not at all here to defend his actions; however, this display would be just downright disgusting. The idea of A) utilizing a firing squad to execute a paralyzed individual, no matter how egregious their crime, is disturbing. B) To livestream the display for potentially millions of people to view and to turn it into a spectacle is a special kind of sadistic. Which suits a regime like this perfectly. This is the kind of display and action that someone like Pete Hegseth daydreams about.

I want to preface all of this by saying I am completely against capital punishment. My initial thoughts on the government carrying something like this out took me back to the American Wild West in the 1800s, with the numerous public hangings that drew large crowds of townsfolk. I guess before we were a so-called civilized society with standardized laws and norms. Leave it to the Trump administration to regress in yet another facet of American society and subvert us somewhere well below depravity. It also reminds me of the Jim Crow South and the thousands of public lynchings of African Americans - the last of which took place in 1936 in Kentucky with the hanging of Rainey Bethea, where roughly 20,000 people gathered to watch. 1936!

Due to the severe and widespread backlash from both Democrats and Republicans, as well as the general public, over this news, the Trump administration is flip-flopping on whether it would carry out this firing squad and livestream it. Dozens of Republicans, including J.D. Vance, say they wouldn't watch it and condemn the idea. Not even Donald Trump wants to own it, as he has given two different answers about whether this was his idea. Should this be carried out, this would be the first execution via firing squad in the United States since 1960 in which the inmate did not choose that as their means of execution. Should the execution be livestreamed and available for any member of the public to view, we would be joining a very small list of nations that make public displays of execution. That would be Iran, North Korea, Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan by means of the Taliban. Only Iran and Afghanistan performed any in 2025 that we know of from available data. I don’t know about you, but I would prefer to see the United States not be in company with countries that have committed blatant human rights violations against their people or execute people in a public manner as an act of deterrence for dissent.