Austin Sarat ScheerPost
Last week, the Trump Administration dropped a bombshell when it announced its plan to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan on December 3. Hasan had been convicted and sentenced to death for the 2009 mass murder of thirteen soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas.
On October 8, Secretary of Defense Pere Hegseth revealed the place and date of Hasan’s execution and the fact that he will be put to death by firing squad. And he added, “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it. That it’s public. Because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”
Other members of the administration expressed their support for Hegseth’s plan. President Trump initially endorsed the livestreaming of Hasan’s execution, then equivocated and, on October, 15 pulled the plug, revealing his decision in a Truth Social post.
The Washington Post reports that “The decision, announced less than three weeks before the midterm elections, marks a significant rebuke of a senior Cabinet official whom Trump has stuck with through numerous controversies despite flagging support for Hegseth within the Republican Party.” It quotes a Trump administration official said ‘’with absolute certainty the White House was caught off guard’ by Hegseth’s announcement last week.”
Nonetheless, Americans should be appalled.
First, by the thought that anyone in a position of authority would entertain such a barbaric idea, and then by Trump’s after-the-fact recanting of Hegseth’s idea. This is yet another example of an administration whose style of governance is disorganized, chaotic, and driven by whatever momentarily strikes Trump’s fancy.
But this one will be particularly damaging to America’s standing in the world. Having entertained a plan that can best be labeled barbaric, Trump chickens out again.
The plan drew international condemnation as well as rebukes from people in this country. All for what?
For example, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said, “that the planned US live stream of the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan does not align with Australia’s values. He said anyone broadcasting it would damage their own reputation and the government would do whatever it could to prevent it being seen. The prime minister said he would make it ‘very clear’ to social media platforms that the content had no place in Australia.”
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, denounced the idea of livestreaming Hasan’s execution, calling it “a form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric explained that “Failure to respect this prohibition would inevitably render the execution arbitrary in nature, and result in a violation of the right to life and the absolute prohibition of torture.”
She added: The “possibility of…a government executing someone in public or in front of live cameras, frankly, is abhorrent.”
Closer to home, the President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, “expressed ‘shock and great sorrow’ over the decision to publicly livestream the execution of Nidal Hassan. ‘Our God is the God of life,’” he added.
The Archbishop made clear that “In no way can Hassan’s actions be condoned, but this decision is a barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered.”
Republican Senator Tom Tillis said, “Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting. Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”
Polls showed that 80% of the American public opposed livestreaming Hasan’s execution.
And then Trump caved in a very Trumpian manner.
He denounced Hasan as “a very bad and evil man, who killed 13 people, including a pregnant soldier, who died, along with her unborn son, and injured, very seriously, 32 more innocent people.” But in the next breath pinned the blame for Hasan’s crime on “Barack Hussein Obama’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).”
Trump claimed that it “ intercepted electronic communications between Hasan and the radical Yemeni-American cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki. When reviewed by his FBI terrorism task force, investigators concluded that Hasan’s emails were not a threat. This assessment of the Obama Administration’s actions was later considered to be a key intelligence failure.”
And then he feigned being a reasonable, open-minded person whose thinking changed as he gathered information. “With all of that being said,” Trump’s Truth Social post continued, “I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device.”
Hasan, Trump concluded, “will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.”
One can be relieved that Trump relented but still be outraged that the most serious thing a government can do was turned into a circus and national embarrassment by Trump’s band of unserious people.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen this on again/off-again style of governance from Trump before.
Last year, during the chaotic rollout of his tariff plan, Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong coined the phrase TACO-Trump Always Chicken’s Out– to describe the president’s pattern of announcing the imposition of stiff tariffs only to modify or repeal them if the stock market did not react favorably.
In fact, the Atlantic’s David Graham generalized and dubbed Trump’s “The TACO Presidency.”
This is not a title that our famously narcissistic president took to kindly.
As the New York Times reported in May 2025, “The president has spent years cultivating a reputation for political muscle. So when he was asked by a reporter in the Oval Office…whether the term might be a valid description of his approach to tariffs, Mr. Trump reacted with ire.”
“’I chicken out? I’ve never heard that,’” he said. “’Don’t ever say what you said,” he told the reporter. “’That’s a nasty question. To me, that’s the nastiest question.’”
Nasty? How about approving a process in which a man is shot at close range by a group of marksmen using high-powered rifles? How about floating the idea of livestreaming at that event?
And then, having brought shame on the country he is leading, he changes his mind and calls off the streaming. I guess “nasty” is a word to describe it, but I think “shameful” would be more apt.
Austin Sarat
Austin D. Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is an internationally renowned scholar whose interdisciplinary work examines law in relation to culture, violence, and the liberal arts. His academic foundation includes a B.A. from Providence College (1969), an M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988). He has also received honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Providence College (2008) and an A.M. from Amherst College (1984). Sarat has also been awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize at Amherst in 2022 and the Ronald Pipkin Service Award as well as many others.
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