How Pete Hegseth’s Plan for a Reality-TV Execution Imploded

D efense Secretary Pete Hegseth has enjoyed President Trump’s full support for any number of Trumpian initiatives: staging macho, campy shows of military bravado; trashing political opponents and the press, often by name; dissing European allies; posting videos of air strikes on suspected drug boats off the coast of Latin America.

But Hegseth apparently crossed a line with his revelation last week that the execution by firing squad of a military death-row inmate would be livestreamed to the world.

Even a president who’d brought a bloody mixed-martial-arts fight to the White House lawn apparently didn’t relish the thought of an afternoon spent watching Army soldiers shoot bullets into a paraplegic.

From the start, Hegseth’s plan for the death of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who shot and killed 13 people in a 2009 rampage at Fort Hood, in Texas, was haphazard.

Trump approved the death sentence on October 2.

Then the Army announced on October 6 that Hasan, who has been on death row since 2013, would be killed in December by firing squad rather than by lethal injection, the method used in many civilian executions.

Two days later, Hegseth told the podcaster Jack Posobiec (known for his promotion of the Pizzagate pedophile conspiracy theory) that Hasan’s execution would be public.

Hegseth confirmed later that day on X that the execution would not be “public” in the typical style of a state-governed execution—conducted in the presence of officials, victims’ relatives, and maybe a few journalists—but rather broadcast via livestream.

Trump was immediately inundated with feedback from friends and confidants, including a number of lawmakers who told the president that Hegseth’s plan was a terrible idea, one close Trump adviser told us.

On October 9, Trump appeared to signal his approval for Hegseth’s idea.

But in remarks in subsequent days, Trump equivocated.

“I know what the military would like to do, but we’ll make a decision,” he said.

Within the administration, there was immediate and “pretty universal revulsion” about the livestream plan, one administration official told us.

By late last week, even the president’s inner circle was making its distaste clear.