Trump casts doubt on livestreaming Fort Hood gunman's execution

US President Donald Trump has cast doubt on whether the firing squad execution of Fort Hood gunman Nidal Hasan will be livestreamed, after the Pentagon’s plan drew condemnation from across the political spectrum and from the United Nations.

“They are making a determination about that, but he will be killed,” Trump said on Friday. “I really don’t care how he goes, as long as he goes,” he added, Dawn reported, citing AFP.

Trump said he had “absolutely” approved the execution of Hasan, whom he called “a maniac”, but had not decided on the broadcast, Geo News reported.

Vance: ‘I’m not going to be watching’

Vice President JD Vance told reporters in Cincinnati that he did not “know that that’s actually going to happen”. He called the 2009 shooting “the worst terrorist attack on American soil outside of 9/11”, but said that if the execution were streamed, “I’m not going to be watching it.”

A Pentagon official had told reporters on Thursday that the execution would be livestreamed, and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth had said: “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public.”

Criticism from both parties

The plan drew a wide range of objections:

• Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, said Hasan should “face justice” but that public executions are “the kind of thing Iran and the Taliban do”
• Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican, backed the death penalty but called the livestream “beyond disgusting”
• Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, called it “a gift to anti-American terrorist recruiters”
• Joe Kent, Trump’s former counterterrorism chief, said it would give terrorists “free propaganda”
• The UN human rights office said livestreaming an execution “is tantamount to a public execution and would breach the absolute prohibition of torture”
• Archbishop Paul Coakley of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops called it a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death”

TikTok pointed to its policy banning depictions of “the shooting of an individual”. YouTube, Meta and X did not immediately say whether they would allow the stream.

The case

Hasan, a former army psychiatrist now 56, killed 13 people and wounded 32 at a medical facility at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009, weeks before he was due to deploy to Afghanistan. Twelve of those killed were soldiers. A military jury convicted him in 2013 and sentenced him to death. He was left paralysed from the waist down after being shot by a civilian police officer.

The execution is set for December 3 at Fort Hood. It would be the first US military execution since 1961 and the military’s first by firing squad since 1945.

According to Amnesty International, at least 17 public executions were carried out worldwide in 2025: six in Afghanistan and 11 in Iran. “Streaming Hasan’s execution would only compound the cruelty,” Amnesty’s Justin Mazzola said.

Why it matters

The backlash, including doubts voiced by the president and vice president, leaves the Pentagon’s plan uncertain less than two months before the execution, and comes as the death penalty faces fresh scrutiny in the US after a botched lethal injection in Tennessee last week.

This article draws on reporting by Dawn, Geo News and AFP.