US President Donald Trump cast doubt Friday on whether authorities will livestream the firing squad execution of the perpetrator of a deadly attack on American soldiers, a plan that has drawn broad and bipartisan condemnation.
Nidal Hasan’s execution—scheduled for December 3 at Fort Hood, Texas, where he gunned down 13 people in 2009—is set to be the first by a US military firing squad since 1945.
A Pentagon official told AFP on Thursday that the execution would be streamed live after US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public.”
But Trump, who supports the death penalty in this case, left uncertain whether the execution would be publicly broadcast.
“They are making a determination about that, but he will be killed,” Trump said. “I really don’t care how he goes, as long as he goes.”
Earlier Friday, Vice President JD Vance told journalists who asked about the planned livestream that he does not “know that that’s actually going to happen.”
“This is a guy who committed, in my view, the worst terrorist attack on American soil outside of 9/11,” Vance said, but added that if the execution is broadcast live, “I’m not going to be watching it.”
Representative Austin Scott of Trump’s Republican Party said he supported executing Hasan, but “livestreaming executions is what jihadists do.” America is better than that.”
Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Hasan should “face justice” but that public executions are “the kind of thing Iran and the Taliban do. Is this who we want to be associated with?”
Tech firms YouTube, Meta, and X did not immediately respond to requests for comment on whether they would allow the execution to be streamed on their platforms.
