List of Republicans Breaking With Trump on Nidal Hasan Execution Livestream
Newsweek · C · trust 52/100
10 Loading video... By Khaleda Rahman National Correspondent
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Several Republicans have broken with President Donald Trump over the Pentagon’s plan to livestream the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ’s announcement earlier this week that the military would livestream the execution prompted a backlash from lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle. Democrats expressed overwhelming opposition, and retiring North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis called the plan to livestream the execution “beyond disgusting.”
Vice President JD Vance cast doubt on whether the execution would actually be livestreamed, but said that he would not watch if it is.
Related Story Vance Casts Doubt on Hegseth’s Livestream Execution Plan Amid Backlash Trump told reporters on Friday that he had personally approved of the Pentagon’s decision to livestream the execution. But earlier, when asked whether he wanted the execution livestreamed and whether he was concerned the footage could be used as propaganda, he said: “Well, they’re making a determination about that, but he will be killed.”
But he said Hasan deserved to be executed by firing squad. “I really don’t care how he goes, as long as he goes. And I think that the death penalty is a very worthy way of going for him,” he said.
Austin Sarat, a professor at Amherst College who has written extensively about the death penalty, previously told Newsweek that while death by firing squad is “always brutal,” livestreaming the execution “will turn that brutality into a spectacle of cruelty.”
“Live-streaming will not educate," Sarat added. "It will terrorize and is beneath the dignity that we owe to anyone, even those who commit the kind of horrific crime that Nidal Hasan did.”
Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment via an email sent outside regular business hours.
The outrage over the plan comes amid fresh scrutiny over how the death penalty is carried out in the United States following the botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee.
Here, Newsweek lists all the Republicans who have spoken out against the plan to livestream Hasan’s execution.
“Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting," Tillis wrote on X.
He added: "Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”
Curtis warned that livestreaming the execution risked cultivating an appetite for executions as entertainment as he urged Hegseth to reconsider the plan.
“Seneca warned that Rome’s bloody spectacles corrupted the people who watched them. A civilization erodes when it cultivates an appetite for executions as a form of entertainment,” the Utah senator wrote on X. “Secretary Hegseth’s plan to livestream the Fort Hood execution risks feeding that appetite. The victims deserve justice administered with solemnity. Broadcasting a death diminishes us and is not an effective deterrent. I urge him to reconsider.”
Kennedy said on Friday that he would not televise or publicize the execution.
“If it were me, I wouldn’t televise it or publicize it or whatever they’re doing,” the Louisiana senator said while campaigning in Michigan for GOP Senate candidate Mike Rogers, NBC News reported. “I just think it makes — it makes our society coarser, and I wouldn’t do it. But there are arguments, you know, on both sides.”
“I absolutely support the sentence of death, but live-streaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that,” the Georgia congressman wrote on X.
“Justice will be served, but the United States of America does not and should not livestream executions,” the Missouri congresswoman wrote on X.
“An execution shouldn’t be a live-streamed spectacle," the Pennsylvania congressman wrote on X. "The focus should be on justice for the victims and their families, not turning an execution into entertainment. Their pain deserves respect, not a public show.”
The Michigan congressman said Hegseth should “seriously reconsider” the decision.
“Nidal Hasan is an evil person. He betrayed our country, killed 13 American soldiers, and wounded dozens more at Fort Hood — a place I trained the year before his brutal attack,” he wrote on X.
Barrett continued: “That does not change the fact that our American values should strive to elevate human dignity. Making a public spectacle out of an already tragic situation is unnecessary and does not serve a public interest.”
“I support bringing this terrorist to justice. I do not support the public livestream of the execution. This should be reconsidered,” the Washington state congressman wrote on X.
Haley, who said she would vote for Trump after suspending her Republican primary campaign 2024, noted in a post on X that Iran and North Korea are among the countries where public executions are still carried out.
“That is not the company we want to keep or the country we want to be,” the former South Carolina governor wrote on X.
The military’s planned firing-squad execution for Hasan is scheduled for 1 p.m. on December 3.
“It’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad,” Hegseth said in an interview with Jack Posobiec of the conservative outlet Real America’s Voice aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on Wednesday.
“And 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.”
Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who held the rank of major, walked into a medical building on November 5, 2009, where soldiers at Fort Hood were waiting to receive medical clearance for deployment.
He shouted “Allahu akbar”—Arabic for “God is great!”—and opened fire and also shot at the…
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