Ever since former weekend host Pete Hegseth was put in charge of the defence of the USA, his obsession with masculinity has developed into a kind of mania in his remaking of the military. While America’s rivals have been focused on developing high-tech, modern militaries for the drone warfare era, Hegseth has introduced new shaving standards, workout regimens, and even testosterone testing. 

At the same time, the broader Trump regime has seemed at times focused on what can often seem like deliberately performative cruelty. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s mass deportation policy relies upon masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents snatching people from the streets – leading to the shooting of multiple civilians in the course of operations.  

Donald Trump himself has threatened more than once to “annihilate” Iran, and has even joked about the destruction of liberal US cities. “The cruelty is the point” has become a recurring mantra of Trump opponents. 

Now, these two trends seem set to converge in the execution of Nidal Hasan by military firing squad in December. On Thursday, Hegseth announced that Hasan’s execution would be livestreamed to the public – an unprecedented move for a US execution. “People need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” he said.

Hasan’s crime could not be more serious: in 2009, he embarked on a mass shooting spree on the Fort Hood military base in Texas, where he worked as an army psychiatrist, killing 14 people – including an unborn baby – and injuring 30 more, after becoming increasingly radicalised by Islamist ideology.

Hegseth said: “Army major betrays his country, radical Islamist, kills a bunch of Americans at Fort Hood. Of course we’re going to do it at Fort Hood. And do it on a Thursday and we’re going to do it at 1 o’clock — which is when he did it — and it’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad. It hadn’t been since World War II since we’ve done that.” 

At a rally in Texas on Wednesday, Trump, who has been vocal for years in his support for the death penalty, told the crowd: “We are going to deliver final justice to an evil killer.”

In the US, where 66 per cent of adults support the death penalty (versus 32 per cent who oppose it), few are likely to protest against its use in Hasan’s case. But publicly broadcasting an execution is a very different matter. It is one thing for the state to kill criminals, and much of the world has banned even that practise. It is quite another for it to be turned into a public spectacle. 

Some US states allow or even require limited public viewing, in person, for executions, typically allowing relatives of a death row inmate’s victims, as well as their own family, to witness the execution if they so wish. But screenings for the broader public are unknown, and increasingly rare across the world. 

In the US, the last state-sanctioned public execution was a hanging nearly a century ago in Kentucky. Both Saudi Arabia and China used to publicly execute criminals, but both have curtailed it, instead conducting executions behind closed doors. In 2025, only two nations held public executions – meaning Hegseth is proposing to add the USA back to a list that presently comprises only Iran and Afghanistan. 

Executing Hasan in such a manner could be particularly dangerous and counterproductive for the USA. Hasan was found to have been motivated by an extreme jihadist ideology, which claims that Western civilisation and Islam are fundamentally incompatible, and seeks to radicalise young men to martyr themselves in lethal attacks. 

Killing Hasan in full public view would make him a martyr on a bigger scale than any suicide attack ever could: there would be footage of the US state killing him, available for use and reuse by any recruiter, at any time. To call it a gift to the USA’s enemies would be the understatement of the century.  

Hegseth’s claimed rationale for a public execution is so that people understand there are “serious consequences” for “these types of things” – but in reality, it would be far likelier to serve as an inventive for further attacks than as a deterrent against them. Either Hegseth does not understand this, or he is actively ignoring it because he wants the spectacle. 

Even leaving aside the issue of whether or not a livestreamed execution makes the risk of reprisal higher, there are reasons not to do it. Naturally, it has not escaped notice that the first person to be executed in public, live on the internet, by the Trump administration is not white. 

The Trump administration has the support of many prominent US white nationalists, and has flirted with their policy preferences – most notably by opening the “Office of Remigration” as a government agency. Executing a Muslim man publicly will make a statement to that group in a way that is difficult for everyone else to ignore. 

It is difficult to see what actual benefit the Trump administration thinks it will get from broadcasting a public execution. It seems vanishingly unlikely to help the Republicans win the midterms. It is likely to increase the risk of reprisal attacks, rather than decrease them. There is no shortage of violent video games, movies, or television, for people who want to watch violence, without the need for a real person to die.  

There is no obvious purpose for a state-funded snuff film. That in itself is alarming – it suggests Hegseth is airing a livestreamed execution simply because he wants to do it, perhaps because on some level he thinks it’s cool, or something his online followers will like. 

Many of the world’s countries find the very concept of execution to be barbaric and outdated. Almost every country that still executes criminals does so privately. By committing to a public execution, Hegseth is laying bare the cruelty at the heart of the Trump administration – and making it all but impossible to look away.