"Victims' families may witness execution in person if they wish," Trump says
President cites deterrence rationale but acknowledges public opposition to broadcast
80% of Americans opposed to live-streaming execution, poll shows
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![US President Donald Trump speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House on Thursday (local time). [AFP]](https://wimg.heraldcorp.com/news/cms/2026/10/16/rcv.YNA.20261016.PAF20261016024001009_P1.jpg)
US President Donald Trump said Thursday (local time) that a firing squad execution of a gunman who attacked a US military base would proceed as planned but would not be broadcast live. The reversal came as opposition to a live broadcast of the execution mounted sharply across the United States.
Trump announced the decision on his Truth Social platform. "He will be executed by firing squad as scheduled, but the execution will not be broadcast live," he wrote.
He added that immediate family members of the victims would be allowed to witness the execution in person if they chose. "They deserve to see justice done," Trump said.
The announcement came shortly after a poll conducted jointly by The Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsos showed overwhelming opposition to a live broadcast of the execution.
The survey found that 53 percent of respondents supported carrying out the execution itself, compared with 42 percent who opposed it. However, 80 percent said they were against broadcasting the execution live.
Earlier this month, Trump approved the military firing squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim American who held the rank of major at the time, for the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, a US Army base in Texas, in which he killed 13 people and was subsequently sentenced to death.
The plan to broadcast the execution live, announced by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, had since drawn a wave of criticism and opposition within the United States.
Trump's decision to drop the live broadcast is widely seen as a response to the political risk of proceeding with less than 20 days until the midterm elections.
The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse said Trump abandoned the live-broadcast plan in the face of bipartisan opposition in Congress and public criticism.
In his Truth Social post, Trump described Hasan as a "traitor" and "evil and vicious," saying he killed 13 people — including a pregnant soldier and her unborn child — and seriously wounded 32 others.
Trump also said the FBI under the Barack Obama administration had intercepted electronic communications between Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Yemeni-American cleric, and that an FBI counterterrorism TF had reviewed the messages and concluded they did not constitute a threat. "This assessment of the Obama administration's actions was later considered a major intelligence failure," Trump said.
Al-Awlaki, who exchanged emails with Hasan, served as a senior leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen, and was identified as a driving force behind radicalization inside the United States. He was killed in Yemen in 2011 in a CIA drone strike.
Trump said he had believed that broadcasting the execution live "could have a powerful deterrent effect by letting the world see how America deals with terrorists and scum like Hasan." He added, however, that "many good and well-meaning people would not want to watch him die on a live stream or through any other visual means."
mokiya@heraldcorp.com
