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Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth further embellished his ghoulish record of craven violence and cruelty by announcing that the US will livestream a public execution by firing squad.
The man scheduled to be executed on December 3 is Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in a horrific mass shooting in 2009. The US has not conducted an execution by firing squad since World War II or a military execution since 1961. It has never broadcast a live execution; only a handful of countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran do so.
Most nations avoid public executions for the pretty obvious reason that turning a person’s death into public entertainment and propaganda is an assault on human dignity. It creates perverse incentives for jackals like Hegseth to target individuals for spectacular acts of violence in the name of self-aggrandizement and polling boosts.
As Trump made clear on Friday, he approved the plan to broadcast the election because he is also a moral vacuum.
Many others, though, rushed to condemn it.
Archbishop Paul Coakley, head of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, called the plan a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death.” Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, senior vice president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said, “Jewish tradition found capital punishment repugnant, and we continue to do so today.” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said he believed that Hasan should be executed but streaming it was “beyond disgusting.” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy also said he supported the death penalty but that Hegseth seemed to be “mimicking ISIS executions” and characterized the idea to livestream it as “medieval.”
Murphy’s comments suggest that a public execution is anachronistic and that we have progressed beyond them. But, as the Trump administration keeps reminding us, we have not, unfortunately, come as far as we’d like to think.
The proposed livestreamed execution of a Palestinian Muslim man is in fact in line with the white supremacism that has shadowed (or more than shadowed) American history, and which Trump loves to pick up, brush off, and supercharge.
Spectacular violence and white supremacy
The immediate precedent for Hegseth’s bloody livestream fantasies is not Europe in the medieval period. It’s the US history of violence against Black people.
Scholar Kellie Carter Jackson writes that following the suppression of a slave rebellion in 1811 in Louisiana, “the rebels’ heads were mounted on stakes along the road leading into New Orleans as a warning to stave off potential uprisings.” Novelist and critic Robert Jones, Jr. notes that
On November 11, 1831, Nat Turner was publicly hanged in Jerusalem (now Courtland), Virginia, for leading an uprising comprised of enslaved Black people. After he was executed, his body was dissected and his skin was flayed and used to make things like purses.
Lynchings from the 1870s into the 1950s were performed under a thin pretense of mob violence, but the truth is that law enforcement de facto sanctioned them. Often police or sheriffs participated enthusiastically. Police would accuse Black people of crimes for any reason or no reason, then white mobs would break into the jails (or walk in, since they were often left unlocked) and hang and burn victims. Lynchings were conducted in a carnival atmosphere; people would take pictures with the dead body and take parts of the corpse as souvenirs.
Hegseth claimed in an interview with far right podcaster Jack Probosiec that his motive for livestreaming the execution was that “people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”
But this is not a very convincing excuse.
People are generally aware that committing mass murder will lead to punishment; those who commit mass shootings often expect to be killed during the commission of their crimes. Hasan was not, but he has been in prison for 17 years and is paralyzed from the waist down after being shot during his attack. You don’t need to create a grotesque spectacle for people to understand that there are serious consequences for committing heinous crimes.
Violent public rituals like the hanging of Nat Turner or lynchings in the Jim Crow south are not just, or even primarily, meant as deterrence. Rather, they are meant to dehumanize their targets and entrench the entitlement and sadistic empowerment of viewers and participants.
Public executions serve the same function as forcing Jewish people to wear yellow stars in Nazi Germany, or as forcing Black people under Jim Crow to sit at the back of the bus. They vividly separate those in the community, worthy of respect and dignity, from those outside it, who are entitled to nothing, not even life — not even a decent death. They identify certain people as dangerous outsiders to fear, and then use that terror and disgust as fuel for violent brutality.
Or, as historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained in discussing the proposed execution, “this is an escalation of an attempt to normalize extreme violence, ritualize violence, militarize the country, and make violence entertaining so when they ask you to commit violence in their name, you will be ready.”
Terror is at the core of Trumpism
Ben-Ghiat says Hegseth’s proposal is an escalation because Trump’s entire political career has involved normalizing and ritualizing extreme violence and selling that violence as a form of entertainment for right-wing media viewers and gutter trolls.
In 2018, Trump and Fox News egged each other on with panicked, vengeful rhetoric about a group of migrants from central America seeking refuge in the US. Fox hosts like Laura Ingraham referred to it as an “invading horde.” Trump and other Fox hosts insisted falsely that the refugees included Middle East terrorists, that they were spreading disease, and that they were funded by Jewish liberal billionaire George Soros. Conspiracy theories like these inspired a far right antisemitic shooter to murder 11 people at a pro-immigrant synagogue in Pittsburgh just before the midterm elections.
Similarly, in 2024, Trump and his running mate JD Vance spread vicious lies that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating pets. These conspiracy theories prompted a stochastic terror campaign of bomb threats and intimidation which forced evacuations of schools and public buildings. Trump has continued to attack Haitians while in office, revoking their legal status, leading to job losses and threatening them with deportation to Haiti, which is undergoing escalating gang violence and where they would likely face extreme violence.
You could multiply incidents almost infinitely. Trump has threatened to “annihilate” Iran; he has urged people in Minnesota to “fight back” against Somali immigrants who are living peacefully in their communities.
He has accused media outlets of “treason” for reporting on the war in Iran. He and his administration have defended ICE immigration enforcement agents kidnapping and shooting people on the street. In each of these cases, individuals and groups are singled out by leaders speaking on behalf of the government and/or the body politic as legitimate targets for hatred and extreme violence by mobs, by agents of the state, or by both.
The cycle of violence
Often these moral panics/two-minute hates are presented openly, and even ostentatiously, as campaign gimmicks.
It’s not an accident that Hegseth and Trump are trumpeting a public execution in the run up to the midterms, just as it’s no accident that the Republican Party is spending millions right now on repulsive anti-trans propaganda. Trump and his fascist toadies believe their base is motivated by fear and hate and status threat. Identify outside groups to despise and subjugate, promise to smite them with murderous, genocidal violence, clean up at the ballot box. Rinse, repeat.
The good news is that these tactics are not in fact especially effective. Virginia and New Jersey were deluged with anti-trans ads from Republicans in 2025, yet Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill both run their gubernatorial races by wide margins.
Support for the death penalty has been slowly falling for decades, though a majority of Americans still say they support it. Many people who support the death penalty though — like Thom Tillis and Chris Murphy — don’t support turning executions into public spectacle. And there’s no evidence that Trump has gotten a bump in approval from backing Hegseth’s ritual murder plan.
The less than good news is that the failure of this tactic as an electoral gambit is not going to dissuade Trump, Hegseth, their goons, or their supporters. That’s because violent spectacle and terror aren’t just tactics to build power. They are goals in themselves.
Hitler targeted Jewish people to rally supporters and build power — and he built power so that he could more horrifically target Jewish people. White people in the US under Jim Crow lynched Black people to secure white power and they secured white power so that they could continue to murder Black people with impunity.
Trump follows the same logic. Violent spectacles targeting marginalized people are meant to use prejudice and demonization of outgroups to build power. And the power is used to fuel violent spectacles targeting marginalized people.
Hegseth and Trump are embracing a public, livestreamed execution because the America they prefer is one in which vaunting hate and communal violence are the norm. That isn’t a new vision for the United States. But it’s one we need to defeat this November, and every day after that.
That’s it for now
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Thanks for reading.
And of course, the manly man optics of shooting a guy in a wheelchair.
“Ben-Ghiat says Hegseth’s proposal is an escalation because Trump’s entire political career has involved normalizing and ritualizing extreme violence and selling that violence as a form of entertainment for right-wing media viewers and gutter trolls.” The irony is that Trump has almost certainly never been in a physical fight. Everyone has seen him make a fist and pretend punch and it is weak. He’s obsessed with violence but he himself can effectuate it.