Nidal Hasan, charged with killing 13 people and wounding 32 in a November 2009 shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas, is pictured in an undated Bell County Sheriff’s Office photograph.
Bell County Sheriff’s Office | Reuters
President Donald Trump said Thursday that the planned execution by firing squad of convicted Fort Hood mass killer Nidal Hasan would not be livestreamed, as the Pentagon had planned.
Trump’s announcement came after growing backlash to showing Hasan’s execution live online, with concern that the footage would become a recruiting tool for terrorists.
Hasan, who is paralyzed from the waist down, is scheduled to be executed at 1 p.m. local time on Dec. 3 in Fort Hood, which is located in Killeen, Texas.
“Nidal Malik Hasan, a former U.S. Army Major turned traitor, is a very bad and evil man,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.
“With all of that being said, I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but, many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device,” Trump wrote.
“He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.”
“That said, the execution may be viewed in person by the immediate families of the victims, if they so choose,” Trump wrote. “They deserve to witness JUSTICE!”
Hours before Trump’s announcement, a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll was released and showed that a whopping 80% of Americans said the execution should not be streamed live, versus just 18% who supported the idea. The poll of 2,545 U.S. adults had a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.
On Monday, Roman Catholic Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who is the archbishop for military services, issued a statement saying that any Catholics assigned to the firing squad should “request to be excused from this action contrary to the teaching of the Church.”
The Pentagon on Oct. 5 said that Trump had approved a recommendation by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to have Hasan, 56, executed by a U.S. Army firing squad for the Nov. 5, 2009, shooting massacre of 13 people at the Army base. Another 32 people were injured in the shooting.
Hegseth on Oct. 8 said the execution would be at Fort Hood and, “He’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be.”
“And we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that … there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said.
The Pentagon later said it would be livestreamed.
Before Trump’s announcement Thursday that the livestream would not happen, it was unclear which major video-streaming platforms, if any, would have aired the execution.
The Verge reported last week that YouTube, Twitch, Meta and X did not respond when asked if they would allow the execution on their sites, while TikTok pointed to the company’s policies barring “shocking and graphic content.
Vice President JD Vance raised doubts last week about whether the livestream is “actually going to happen,” saying he would not watch it if it did.
“So whatever the controversy is about the method of the execution, I hope that people don’t forget that this is the guy who brutally murdered a lot of innocent people,” Vance said. “Now, that said, if it’s ultimately livestreamed, I’m not going to be watching it.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., last week said in a post on X that the idea of livestreaming the execution was “beyond disgusting.”
“Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do,” Tillis tweeted. “It should not be happening in America.”
Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, condemned the plan to show the execution publicly.
“Our God is the God of life. In no way can Hassan’s actions be condoned but this decision is a barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered. The word of God exhorts us: ‘do not repay anyone evil for evil,’ ” Coakley said, quoting St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans.
“The public execution even of one who has done grave harm will only further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people,” Coakley said.
Hasan was convicted and sentenced to death after a 2013 court-martial.
He would be the first person executed as the result of a U.S. armed forces court-martial since 1961. That year Army Pvt. John Bennett was hanged at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for the rape and attempted murder of a girl in Austria.
CNBC has reached out to the Pentagon for comment on Trump’s post.
Nader Hasan, a cousin of Nidal who had spoken out after the Fort Hood shooting, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
