Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth touched off a major controversy when he announced that the Pentagon would livestream the firing squad execution of former Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, who is scheduled to be put to death later this year for a mass shooting at Fort Hood in 2009.

“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.

Seven days later, President Donald Trump came to the opposite conclusion. On Thursday morning, the president published an item to his social media platform that read, in part:

Nidal Malik Hasan, a former U.S. Army Major turned traitor, is a very bad and evil man, who killed 13 people, including a pregnant soldier, who died, along with her unborn son, and injured, very seriously, 32 more innocent people. […]

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. He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.

In the same online statement, Trump went out of his way to blame Hasan’s massacre, at least in part, on “Barack Hussein Obama’s Federal Bureau of Investigation” and “the Obama Administration.”

The Republican concluded that immediate family members of the victims will be permitted to view the execution “in person … if they so choose.”

The statement appears to resolve a burgeoning debate and bipartisan backlash over the kind of public display that is ordinarily limited to countries like Iran and the Taliban-led Afghanistan.

Trump’s decision came just hours after a nationwide poll released by The Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsos found that 80% of Americans opposed livestreaming Hasan’s firing squad execution.

While there was a partisan gap in the results, even Republican voters opposed the livestreaming by a nearly 2-to-1 margin — though 57% of men affiliated with MAGA actually supported the idea.

This was the only constituency that endorsed the planned public execution.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

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