A Note to Readers: This piece was originally published on NewsOne, October 16, 2026.
Donald Trump announced Thursday on Truth Social that his regime will not livestream the Dec. 3 execution of Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter convicted of killing 13 people in 2009. Trump said the execution will still proceed on schedule, but apparently many Americans don’t have the stomach to watch what a firing squad actually does to a human body.
Hasan, a former Army psychologist, is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair. Military officials have not yet disclosed whether they plan to shoot him while seated in that wheelchair or whether they’ll use some other apparatus to restrain him. According to the Army’s historical firing squad execution procedures, eight riflemen stand 15 paces from a hooded prisoner and fire simultaneously at a four-inch target positioned over the condemned person’s heart. And heaven forbid that the first round of bullets fails to kill him. Under Army procedures, one soldier would aim his pistol just above the condemned man’s ear and fire a final shot to the head from one foot away.
Can you imagine the optics of the United States government executing a paralyzed prisoner circulating around the world?
Now, we don’t know if such optics influenced Trump’s decision, but he said in his statement: “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.”
Are we now supposed to applaud as if we’ve witnessed a national breakthrough in civility and human dignity?
What has fascinated me about this controversy is not Trump’s reversal, but that America appears to be rejecting the proposed livestream without being honest about its long historical bloodlust for public executions and spectacle lynchings. White America continues to deny that this kind of sadistic violence is still deeply embedded in its political culture, collective imagination, and psychological architecture of terror that this country has never dismantled since colonization.
White America likes to gaslight Black folks and pretend like our people aren’t still living in the traumatic echoes of a past that snatched at least 6,000 Black lynching victims’ lives in the decades following Emancipation. Here we are in 2026, and Black bodies are still being found hanging from trees and other public spaces across this country while our families and communities demand facts while being told we’re living in the past and that our hypervigilance is paranoia.
After Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced last week that the Pentagon had planned to livestream Hasan’s execution, there was a bipartisan outbreak of historical denial and amnesia among politicians and pundits about spectacle violence in this country. They kept insisting that public executions “aren’t America” and are something only foreign barbarians do.
Continue reading the rest of my commentary for free on NewsOne.
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THIS CONTENT IS WRITTEN IN THE AUTHOR’S PERSONAL CAPACITY. ANY OPINIONS EXPRESSED ARE THE AUTHOR’S OWN AND SHOULD NOT BE ATTRIBUTED TO HOWARD UNIVERSITY OR MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY.
