Military shooting
Trump cancels live broadcast of execution
Updated 10/15/2026 – 5:32 p.mReading time: 3 minutes
First the whole world should be able to watch a convicted assassin being executed. Now Trump is announcing that he is backing down.
The planned shooting of a condemned assassin at a military base in the US state Texas should not be broadcast via live stream after all. Many “very good and well-meaning people” did not want to watch the man die, the US President explained Donald Trump the U-turn on his platform Truth Social.
In his opinion, a public broadcast could have had a strong deterrent effect. The execution of Nidal Hasan, who carried out a massacre at a military base in 2009, will now not be shown on the Internet. The closest relatives of the victims could be there in person if they wished, Trump said.
Hasan is scheduled to be executed by firing squad on December 3 at the Fort Hood military base in the US state of Texas. The former military psychiatrist killed 13 people and injured 32 others in an attack there in 2009.
Livestream plans met with cross-party criticism
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had first announced last week that the execution would take place in public and then later confirmed that there would be a livestream. They will ensure that people can publicly observe Hasan’s execution, he told the right-wing conservative US broadcaster Real America’s Voice. “People need to understand that such acts have serious consequences.”
The project met with sharp criticism across party lines. US Vice President JD Vance had expressed doubts about the plans and said he would not look at a possible transfer. Critics warned, among other things, that the recordings could serve as propaganda material for terrorists. At the same time, the plans raised questions about how one could have prevented children, for example, from watching the execution.
In the United States, public shootings were used as a deterrent, including during the American Civil War in the 19th century. The last generally public execution in the USA It was 1936 when a man was hanged in the state of Kentucky in front of thousands of onlookers.
Internationally, according to the human rights organization, last year Amnesty International at least 17 public executions took place: six in Afghanistan and eleven in Iran. If the USA had gone through with its plan, it would have brought it into proximity with states whose actions they like to denounce elsewhere.
The Democrats made another comparison: their Senator Chris Murphy appeared in an interview with the US broadcaster CNN visibly shocked when he heard Hegseth’s announcement last week: “This is disgusting. What is he imitating? Executions by (the Islamic State terrorist militia) IS?” He understands that there is the death penalty in the USA – “but public executions are medieval.” This is one of the practices of terrorist groups that the USA abhors.
