Trump Calls Off the Livestream of a Firing-Squad Execution
The president has cancelled plans to broadcast the execution of the former army psychiatrist who shot dead thirteen soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009. “He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed,” he wrote, saying many “very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die”. Victims’ families may still attend in person.
The execution is set for 3 December and will be the first American military execution in more than sixty years. The reversal follows a fortnight of criticism after the Pentagon announced both the date and the broadcast: the United Nations called the plan “abhorrent”, the defence secretary Pete Hegseth defended it on the grounds that “people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things”, and the vice-president publicly doubted it would happen and said he would not watch. The president himself hedged, saying last week that he “absolutely” approved while the Pentagon was still “making a determination”. For scale: of more than 2,700 executions carried out across seventeen countries last year, only two states held any in public, with eleven known public executions in Iran in 2025 and six in Afghanistan. A lawyer for the condemned man, John Galligan, said the plan “violated the Army’s own regulation” and that his client is paralysed from the chest down.