Fort Hood execution livestream scrapped after backlash

President Donald Trump has called off the Fort Hood execution livestream, reversing the Pentagon's plan to broadcast the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist convicted of the Fort Hood shooting. In a post on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump said the execution would go ahead as scheduled by firing squad, but it would not be streamed. The decision ended a week of intense criticism from both parties, victims' families, and religious leaders, who said a public broadcast would turn tragedy into entertainment and give extremists a recruiting tool.

How a Pentagon promise turned into a national argument

The Pentagon announced the broadcast a week earlier. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth revealed the Fort Hood execution livestream plan in an interview with conservative commentator Jack Posobiec aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, according to the New York Post. He said soldiers with rifles would carry out the firing squad and promised that the public would be able to watch, arguing that people needed to understand the consequences of crimes like this. A Fort Hood execution livestream would have made it the first public execution in the United States in almost a century.

But the plan was never coordinated inside the government: CNN reported that people across the Pentagon and the Army were caught off guard, and a White House official told reporters that Trump and his advisers had not been briefed before Hegseth spoke. The reversal capped a rough week for the Pentagon chief, who had been heckled as a war criminal by protesters at a major Army conference a day earlier, according to USA Today.

Who Hasan is and what the 2009 attack changed

The backlash came from inside Trump's own coalition. House Speaker Mike Johnson told CBS News that footage of the Fort Hood execution livestream could become a recruiting tool for future terrorists, and said several lawmakers had raised concerns. Vice President JD Vance said he would not watch the broadcast and expressed doubt that it would ever happen. The backlash joined a crowded month of Trump administration reversals, including the collapse of Trump's Ukraine energy ceasefire as Russian strikes continued. Trump himself admitted he had not been part of the original decision; sources told CNN he did not know what to make of the plan at first, though he remained firmly behind the execution itself. After days of private deliberation with his advisers, Trump reversed it on Thursday. The Times reported that some officials worried a livestream of a paralyzed man's death would hand America's adversaries a propaganda victory.

Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist, opened fire on unarmed soldiers at the Texas base on November 5, 2009, killing 13 people and wounding 32 others in the largest mass murder at a U.S. military installation, according to USA Today. He was shot by first responders during the attack and has been paralyzed since. A military jury sentenced him to death in 2013. His execution, now scheduled for December 3, would be the Army's first in decades. Trump also used the announcement to criticize the FBI's handling of Hasan's communications with the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki before the shooting, calling the bureau's assessment an intelligence failure.

What happens next

Polling showed the public hated the idea. In an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released Thursday, eighty percent of U.S. adults, including sixty-four percent of Republicans, said the Fort Hood execution livestream should not happen, according to CNN. The families of Hasan's victims were equally opposed. Keely Cahill Vanacker, whose father Michael Cahill was killed in the shooting, told the Times that broadcasting the execution would turn tragedy into entertainment, and that canceling the broadcast gives the families a chance for peace. She added: extremism leads to extremism, and violence only leads to violence, she told the Times.

The execution will still proceed by firing squad, and Trump said the immediate families of the victims could watch in person if they chose. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said Hegseth spoke with Trump before the announcement and that the two were aligned on the reversal. Trump said he still believed the Fort Hood execution livestream could have deterred terrorists, but concluded that many good and well-meaning people would rather not watch a man die. Lawmakers from both parties had raised concerns about the proposal in the days before the reversal, according to the Wall Street Journal. It was not the only controversy drawing fire this week: Meta's ban on TikTok ads across Facebook and Instagram drew its own wave of criticism.