During Joe Biden’s presidency, the Democratic administration took steps to end federal executions, including a measure that converted 37 death row inmates’ sentences to life in prison. Donald Trump vowed to reverse course and use federal powers to kill more people. To that end, the Republican president and his team have authorized seeking death sentences against 44 defendants.

But as important as these developments are, it’s also notable how, exactly, Team Trump is prepared to proceed with these executions. The Associated Press reported:

The Justice Department will adopt firing squads as a permitted method of execution as the Trump administration moves to ramp up and expedite capital punishment cases, officials said Friday. […]

The federal government has not previously included firing squad as a method of execution in its protocols, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Five states currently allow executions by firing squad: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah.

The policy shift was announced in a statement from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whose document spent a fair amount of time denouncing Biden as part of the Republican lawyer’s latest apparent attempt to make Trump happy.

It’s worth emphasizing that Trump’s Justice Department hasn’t explicitly said it will start killing people with firing squads, but now this option is on the table as part of a new, streamlined process in which the administration intends to expedite death penalty cases.

Time will tell what becomes of the shift and whether there are related Eighth Amendment court fights, but the developments reminded me of something Rachel Maddow told viewers back in 2014, when Republican policymakers advanced similar measures at the state level.

“Over time, we’ve executed people by a number of different methods in this country,” she explained. “And every time, as we evolve out of one old method and into a new one, we tell ourselves that the new one is a more humane way of doing it, a more sanitized way of doing it. It’s a more certain way of killing people. And then, eventually, to use a legal term, our evolving standards of decency grow us out of our latest method of killing people and into a new one.”

The observation stuck with me because it’s both true and important. There’s been a pattern of American officials agreeing to kill American citizens in ways considered less gruesome and less barbaric than previous methods. Hangings gave way to firing squads, which gave way to the electric chair, which gave way to lethal injection and so on.

The idea, by all appearances, has been to make executing people more civilized and less brutal.

But in 2026, Trump and his team are apparently comfortable rolling back the clock, not because firing squads have somehow become more sanitary, but because they just don’t seem to care.

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