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.
“Regimes in Iran, North Korea, and ISIS carry out public executions, not America,” said Virginia Democrat Rep. Suhas Subramanyam.
“Is this what we have become? Iran? Afghanistan?” asked retired Navy admiral William H. McRaven. He also argued in his essay published in The Atlantic, that publicly displaying a government-sanctioned execution violates America’s national values of dignity and honor.
During a CNN interview, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) called public executions medieval and compared them to ISIS practices that should not be happening in America. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, and Republican Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia echoed these sentiments by pointing to oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan. Rep. Scott said, “Live-streaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that.”
Fox News commentator Howard Kurtz asked: “Is this America?” Many thousands gone would like to answer with an unflinching yes, but they can’t.
That’s because America riddled their bodies with bullets, burned them alive, hanged them from gallows and trees, mutilated their corpses, carved off pieces of their flesh as souvenirs. At the 1916 lynching of teenager Jesse Washington, a crowd of 15,000 people cheered as he was burned for hours and his genitals were severed and passed around in a handkerchief. Photos from that lynching show adolescent and teenage boys perched in trees to get a good look, and a gaggle of young boys plucked Washington’s charred teeth from his head and auctioned them off.
In my newly released book, Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children, I demonstrate how lynchings were family gatherings where white people ate, got drunk, danced, prayed, kissed and held hands, and reaffirmed their familial and communal bonds over the public destruction of Black bodies.
At the August 1930 lynching of teenagers Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, pregnant white women in the crowd of 5,000 posed for a photograph underneath the bloody corpses. The youngest victims of lynchings I documented include nine unborn children who died when their mothers were shot, burned, and hanged. These spectacles, which were advertised in newspapers, attended by thousands, facilitated by law enforcement, photographed and commercialized, turned the destruction of human bodies into entertaining civil rituals.
Despite the historical receipts, politicians from both parties are out here peddling the same comforting fairy tale of America as a civilized nation, even though publicly killing is absolutely an American tradition and foundational to the construction of democracy.
No, this country did not invent public hangings and other forms of public killing. White America’s colonizer ancestors brought centuries of public hanging, burning, beheading, drawing, quartering, mutilating, and displaying rotting corpses across the Atlantic with them. White America inherited those barbaric traditions, and then adapted them to its own capitalistic political order and racialized the spectacle for entertainment, pleasure, and for familial and communal bonding. And Black folks were not the only victims. Mexicans, Chinese immigrants, Indigenous folks, and European immigrants were destroyed by lynch mobs for different reasons.
Hillary Clinton called the proposed livestream “a barbaric idea, beneath our dignity as a country.” Ma’am, beneath what dignity? Senator Chris Murphy asked, “Public hangings and executions, that’s what America has become?” Sir? Become?
America has spent most of its history brutalizing and destroying human bodies considered disposable. In fact, we watched the old violent impulse return on January 6, 2021, when a dysregulated white mob stormed the United States Capitol. A guillotine and makeshift gallows with a noose were erected on the grounds as rioters chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.” They wanted to lynch the vice president.
Taken together, the January 6 riot and the Pentagon’s proposed livestream demonstrate that America’s appetite for spectacle violence never left this culture. The technology may have changed, but the enduring belief that publicly destroying a human body can communicate political messages about power has not.
Listen, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with our leaders saying that we should aspire to national dignity. There’s also nothing wrong with saying that America must never again turn killing people into public entertainment. But this country must stop trying to disown the ugly, embarrassing parts of our history, and it must stop manufacturing a fictional past to prove we have dignity and civility. Because “this isn’t who we are” is one of America’s favorite lies.
Walter White, the legendary NAACP investigator who risked his life infiltrating white lynch mobs, understood something our political leaders refuse to confront: if we keep pretending that spectacle violence belongs to another country, century, or people, the mob will always remain primed to “demand new victims.”
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