Trump cancels planned livestream of Nidal Hasan execution amid backlash

President Donald Trump announced in a Thursday post on Truth Social that he canceled the Pentagon's plan to livestream the Dec. 3 firing-squad execution of convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan.

"He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed," Trump said of Hasan.

The former Army major and psychiatrist murdered 13 people and injured 32 others at the Fort Hood Army base in Killeen, Texas, on Nov. 5, 2009.

The president wrote that broadcasting Hasan's execution "might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan," but he acknowledged that "many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device."

"That said, the execution may be viewed in person by the immediate families of the victims, if they so choose. They deserve to witness JUSTICE!" Trump added.

Trump's announcement came after Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told conservative political activist Jack Posobiec in an interview aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln earlier this month that the public would be able to watch soldiers shoot Hasan in December, according to The Washington Post.

A Pentagon official later confirmed that the execution would be livestreamed, according to CBS News.

The planned public execution prompted debate among Christians about the morality and wisdom of the U.S. government livestreaming an execution.

Tony Perkins, president of the Washington-based Christian conservative advocacy group Family Research Council, wrote on Facebook that while he sees a "biblical foundation" for capital punishment, that doesn't mean "executions should become public spectacles."

"[W]hen we separate capital punishment from its moral foundation, we risk turning an act of justice into what appears to be an act of vengeance," Perkins wrote. "Rather than affirming the sanctity of human life, a public spectacle of death can communicate the opposite message —that human life has little value."

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) denounced the plan Friday. Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, the USCCB president and archbishop of Oklahoma City, said he learned of the decision "with shock and great sorrow." He called it "a barbaric promotion of a culture of death" that must be reconsidered, according to The Catholic Herald.

Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of First Baptist Dallas and an outspoken Trump supporter, backed the public execution. He cited Genesis 9:6, in which God establishes capital punishment with Noah based on the sanctity of life. "The more people that can see that truth illustrated through a public execution, the better," Jeffress wrote.

Jeffress told The Dallas Morning News that the book of Romans supports the death penalty and that he planned to watch Hasan's execution.

Evangelist Franklin Graham, CEO of Samaritan's Purse, wrote on Facebook that he "found it ironic that many who embrace Hollywood and its culture of death that is constantly depicting murders, rapes, and all kinds of violence — all in the name of entertainment — are saying they're so appalled at this. Have we become desensitized to death?"

In his weekly monologue Wednesday, political commentator Tucker Carlson argued against livestreaming the execution, which he suggested reflects a growing callousness toward human life in the United States.

Carlson cited a letter British novelist Charles Dickens wrote to The Times of London in 1849 after witnessing the public execution of Frederick and Marie Manning, a married couple convicted of murder and hanged together outside a London jail.

Without commenting on the morality of capital punishment, Dickens wrote that he had been "astounded and appalled" by the wickedness he saw among the tens of thousands of spectators, whose behavior he likened to a drunken carnival. His writings on the subject helped lead to the Capital Punishment Amendment Act 1868, which ended public executions in the United Kingdom.

"No one really argued that they didn't deserve to be punished, maybe even executed for what they did," Carlson said of the Mannings. "Dickens didn't make that argument. He made instead made the argument that doing it in public brought out something ugly and dangerous in the people who watched. It lowered them almost to the level of the people they were watching die. It incited bloodlust in them."