By Nick Catoggio
Friday, October 09, 2026
The Atlantic reported Wednesday that “the Pentagon
has presented [Donald] Trump with a series of options that would restart
hostilities [in Iran] after the midterms,” which isn’t surprising.
What’s surprising, at least by the standards of
conventional politics, is that the White House has allegedly also requested
options for strikes before the midterms.
The last thing Republicans need as Americans go to the
polls is renewed combat in an unpopular “forever war” that’s already blown gas
prices—and Democrats’ odds of retaking Congress—sky high. And the president
grasps that on some level, promising yesterday on Truth Social that there won’t be a new attack on Iran before November 3.
But if he changes his mind and orders a new U.S. bombing
campaign later this month, none of us will blink. It’s actually not surprising,
after all, that a postliberal might feel pulled to make a spectacle of his own
ruthlessness before a popular referendum on his presidency.
The Atlantic explains why. White House aides who
support hitting Iran sooner rather than later “believe that further action
after months of uneasy peace could allow Trump to demonstrate strength and
potentially declare some sort of victory, giving Republicans much-needed
momentum heading into the election,” its report claims.
Strength. The postliberal solution to all
problems.
Objectively, “PRESIDENT RESUMES WAR, DECLARES VICTORY FOR
37TH TIME” would not be a good Election Day headline for the GOP. But when your
ideology rests on the belief that modernity’s great crisis is a surfeit of
empathy, and when you’re convinced that Americans gave you a mandate in 2024 to
do something about it, a showy dose of merciless force will always seem like
the right answer to any political question.
I thought about that yesterday when I heard that Pete
Hegseth is planning to make a snuff film.
The secretary of defense revealed on Thursday that the execution of Nidal Hasan will be livestreamed on
December 3. Hasan is the Army officer turned jihadist who murdered 13 people
and wounded 32 more at Fort Hood in 2009; he was condemned to death following a
court-martial and will finally face a military firing squad. If you were hoping
to see him die while you’re having lunch, you’ll have your chance: The killing
will be carried out at 1 p.m. on a Thursday, just as Hasan’s own attack was,
Hegseth took care to note.
“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,” the secretary explained to MAGA propagandist Jack Posobiec in an
interview. Not since World War II has the U.S. military executed someone by
firing squad (and not since 1937 has America executed anyone publicly), but
Hegseth was untroubled. “I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II,
which was win,” he told Posobiec.
Only a few nations around the world still carry out
public executions—Iran, notoriously and ironically, is one—and as far as I’m
aware, none stoop to broadcasting the events to a mass audience. If you want to
gawk at death there, you need to show up in person. Only in this country, where
the executive branch is led by one former television host and the military is
led by another, will cameras be enlisted to turn a violent killing into popular
entertainment.
Even for Pete Hegseth, that’s pretty Pete Hegseth. It’s
showtime in postliberal America.
Bad politics.
The first and less important thing to say about
livestreaming an execution is that it’s likely to backfire on the
administration.
I’m not sure that it would. If there’s one shining lesson
from the last 10 years in politics, it’s to never underestimate Americans’
tolerance for moral degeneracy in government. In fact, while polling on
televised executions is sparse, one survey conducted more than 20 years ago in the thick of
the war on terror showed a solid majority in favor of the practice. Two-thirds
of respondents said they’d support it—although 54 percent cautioned that they
personally wouldn’t watch.
That seems promising for the president and the war-crimes
enthusiast he put in charge of the Pentagon. Hegseth might even have an
electoral motive for livestreaming Hasan’s death: The transgressive indecency
of it is sure to thrill a few otherwise disaffected populists, potentially
luring them to turn out in November. If Democrats win, no more snuff.
So why might it backfire?
For one thing, support for the death penalty ain’t what
it used to be. Gallup found 63 percent in favor in 2004, the year the
survey I mentioned was taken, versus 31 percent opposed. Last year that gap had
narrowed to 52-44, the smallest margin since the 1960s. And after the recent
fiasco in Tennessee, where inmate Christa Pike survived a botched lethal
injection and is now allegedly suffering from “cognitive challenges,” it’s a safe bet that next year’s
margin will be tighter still.
Making a ghoulish pageant of Hasan’s death seems like the
kind of thing that might plausibly tip those who remain ambivalent about
capital punishment into opposition—which, in a way, would be par for the
course. On issues ranging from
the deficit to immigration to free trade, the Trump administration’s incompetence and
cruelty have turned centrists against Republican policies again and again. Why
wouldn’t “overreach” on the death penalty cause a similar backlash?
When a party is run by malicious
goblins who revel in their own provocative villainy, persuadable voters may
conclude that supporting its policies would make them malicious goblins too. As
one of my editors said this morning, a different kind of administration might
get the benefit of the doubt about having a valid policy reason to stage a
televised execution—but this isn’t a different kind of administration.
And frankly, a different kind of administration wouldn’t
do such a thing even if it did have a valid policy reason.
To make matters worse, Hasan is a paraplegic, paralyzed
when he was shot during his massacre. He’ll need to be propped up somehow for
the “show” he’ll be starring in. How is that likely to play publicly? It’s no
coincidence, I think, that some opponents of capital punishment believe
televising the practice will help
their cause. Or that our vice president, who’ll face a national electorate
as the GOP nominee in 2028, is already distancing
himself from the spectacle.
The politics are bad for Trump in a second way.
Some argue
that Hasan is qualitatively different from garden-variety murderers in that, by
killing fellow members of the military, he effectively committed treason
(although he wasn’t convicted of treason, to be clear). Hegseth alluded to
that, too, when he said, “People need to understand that there’s serious
consequences for these types of things.” Livestreaming Hasan’s death is a way
to drive home to the entire armed forces the gravity of treachery in the ranks.
But in that case, why make the livestream available to
the wider public instead of limiting it to military installations via
closed-circuit?
And, given the political nature of Hasan’s crime, why
produce footage of his final moments that will inevitably circulate among
jihadis eager to celebrate him as a “martyr”? (Per his wishes, by the way.) It’s not as if the military
has been besieged by a rash of inside-job Islamist rampages since 2009 that
might warrant an extraordinary attempt at deterrence like a televised
execution. Whatever marginal benefit this might bring in the form of
discouraging U.S. soldiers from “fragging” each other will be offset, and then
some, by the propaganda it creates for terrorists eager to kill those soldiers
themselves.
On top of all that, disgust at this spectacle among
Democrats and the wider public will only further juice the nascent “impeach
Hegseth” effort, which is gathering strength. Maybe the White House doesn’t care
about that, as having the other party try and fail to remove you from
office—even (or especially) when it’s justified on the merits—has become a
badge of honor to the villainous nihilistic right.
But at some point the president might decide that the
secretary has become more trouble politically than he’s worth, particularly
when there are a million other somewhat less obnoxious toadies who will also
slavishly do Trump’s bidding in that job. If livestreaming Hasan’s execution
turbo-charges the push to oust Hegseth, his career might follow the deceased
into oblivion.
Bad morals.
Set politics aside, though. The heart of the objection to
televising the execution is this: Why does the White House want people to watch
this man die?
“Deterrence” is a fig leaf, as there’s little additional
information to be gained by watching something happen that will be reported in
every news outlet in America the next day anyway. If you murder U.S. soldiers,
you’ll be violently killed: That lesson will be clearly communicated to every
corner of the country whether or not people witness it firsthand.
Trump and Hegseth want you to watch it because they think
you’ll enjoy it. They want you to enjoy it. And more importantly, they want you
to feel comfortable enjoying it.
I joked with colleagues this morning that my daily
challenge with this newsletter is having to find newish ways to make the point
that postliberalism is all about normalizing ruthlessness. Whenever the
president and his fans bump up against some law or norm that’s keeping them
from sating their tribal appetites, inevitably their impulse is to sweep it
aside and indulge. It’s the ur-narrative of this entire era.
Trumpism is more an
alternate morality than it is a political program, as regular readers have
seen me say a good two dozen times. Has there ever been a clearer example than
Hegseth wanting to stream an enemy’s death live on the internet?
“Televising the execution is barbaric. It will coarsen
the culture,” Washington Examiner columnist Tim
Carney tweeted on Thursday. “This administration is robbing our country of
its dignity,” Democratic Rep.
Melanie Stansbury lamented. The reproachful tone of both points made me
laugh, as if perhaps Hegseth hadn’t considered that killing a guy on camera
might have deleterious consequences for America’s character. Not only is he
aware of those consequences, he wants them.
The cruelty is the point, to borrow Adam Serwer’s famous line. If classical liberalism is the
idea that government power should be feared and circumscribed lest it be
abused, postliberalism is the idea that government power should be abused to
rid the country (or world) of undesirables. The more conditioned Americans
become to seeing the state behave cruelly toward those undesirables, the less
objectionable to them the postliberal vision will seem.
The difference between executing Hasan and executing him
on camera is the difference between justice and sadism. He deserves to die for
his crime, but inviting Americans to gawk at the process of killing him amounts
to encouraging them to derive voyeuristic pleasure from it. It’s not like
looking at a news photo after the fact. It’s exciting. It’s lascivious.
Even the fact that the execution has been scheduled at
Fort Hood for the same day of the week and time of day as Hasan’s own rampage
hints at a motive that’s more vengeful than lawful. A bureaucrat carrying out a
legal sentence doesn’t care about the where and when of it; caring about
symmetry in the where and when suggests revenge, and revenge is rich with
prurient pleasure.
“Americans will use violence if and when justified, but
we do not rejoice in it,” former Trump official Joe
Kent tweeted yesterday after the news about Hasan broke. “Rejoicing” in
another’s suffering is a decent definition of sadism, precisely what Trump and
Hegseth hope to normalize here. And erasing the distinction between justice and
sadism is a pretty decent definition of postliberalism.
More so than most Trump deputies, Hegseth has always
understood the importance of desensitizing Americans morally to what the modern
right is trying to build. He’s made the case tirelessly for years, before and
after becoming defense secretary, that the military is too squeamish about killing civilians in war. Inevitably,
he was also going to make the case that the public is too squeamish about
killing people on camera. If anything, the fact that America hasn’t staged a
public execution since the 1930s is a plus for him: It fits with MAGA nostalgia
that America’s
heyday, the era when it was at its greatest, came when it was more brutal.
All we need to do to be great again is be brutal again
is a nifty way to desensitize people.
In charge.
And so it isn’t a cheap shot to say that Hegseth seems to
think the men under his command and the civilians whom he serves would benefit
from behaving a little more like, well, ISIS. Turning an execution into
propaganda is another nudge in that direction.
As ISIS does, he hopes supporters take heart from the
video in how far their leadership is willing to go to advance the cause they
share. The Trump administration might not have kept America out of war or made
groceries cheaper, he means to demonstrate, but it will literally shoot
someone during a livestream as a form of macabre entertainment for anomic
chuds eager to call anyone who objects to doing so a “pussy.”
Who knows? As one editor suggested this morning, the
White House might even end up making a “sizzle reel” of the killing and posting
it online to be shared by all. If we’re going to do jihadis’ work for them by
filming this, we might as well help them circulate it, too.
Ultimately, as with attacking Iran before the midterms,
livestreaming Hasan’s execution is one of those things that seems surprising
until you remember who’s in charge, at which point it seems so inevitable that
you wonder how you didn’t predict it. It even has some of the same hallmark
failures of the Iran war, having been sprung on Americans with no explanation
for why it’s necessary or needs to be done now and seemingly without
anticipating how our enemies might react. In fact, this isn’t the first time Trump
has dialed up the weirdness in executions at a moment when he felt his grip on
power slipping.
In July 2020, with his prospects for reelection
deteriorating, the president’s administration carried out a federal death
sentence for the first time since 2003. After that the executions came
fast and furious, on through the postelection period despite a precedent of
pausing capital punishment during a presidential transition, as if Trump felt
impelled to kill as many inmates as possible before Joe Biden could commute
their sentences. Or perhaps, given that he and his cronies were also trying to
engineer a coup at the time, to demonstrate with supreme authoritarian hubris
that his power—over life and death itself—remained undiminished.
As Americans prepare to drub him at the polls, he’s found
a freakishly vivid way in Hasan’s execution to remind them of his power again.
Enjoy the show.
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