Retired general predicts Trump’s firing-squad fantasy will implode

What happened

AlterNet reports that President Donald Trump is reconsidering having Nidal Malik Hasan executed by firing squad after learning that Hasan, now 60, is paralyzed from the chest down and uses a wheelchair. Citing CBS News and a discussion on The Bulwark’s “Command Post” podcast, the report says the physical reality of the proposed execution may not produce the spectacle Trump expected.

Retired Gen. Mark Hertling and former prosecutor Margaret Donovan said the proposal would also create serious logistical, regulatory and ethical problems for the Army. Military executions are ordinarily conducted at Fort Leavenworth, not Fort Hood, and no serving personnel have experience carrying out a firing-squad execution. They also warned that the spectacle could aid Hasan’s desired portrayal of himself as a religious martyr and inflict moral injury on the service members ordered to participate.

The power belongs to the president

Hasan has no institutional control over the proposed execution. The decisive power sits with Trump and the military officials responsible for implementing any lawful order. The soldiers who might be assigned to fire the rifles would carry the psychological burden, but they would not be the architects of the event.

That distinction matters because spectacle can blur the chain of responsibility. A firing squad visually centers the people holding the weapons. Politically, however, the relevant decision is made far above them: whether the state should arrange this particular method of killing, at this particular location, under these particular conditions.

Governance reduced to stagecraft

According to the account presented by AlterNet, Trump’s hesitation arose after he learned that Hasan could not stand before the squad. If accurate, that suggests the wheelchair changed the envisioned image before it changed the underlying policy judgment.

That is not serious executive deliberation. It is governance organized around a scene: the condemned man, the rifles, the military backdrop and the president’s preferred posture of command. Army regulations, facilities, training requirements and the welfare of participating personnel become production complications.

Donovan’s question—whether the expense and logistical burden are justified for something functioning as theater—identifies the political failure precisely. The military is an institution with legal duties and human members, not a collection of props available to complete a president’s historical reenactment.

Cruelty does not become strength on camera

Hertling’s description strips away the sanitizing language. Hasan would reportedly be shot while seated in a wheelchair. The ammunition under discussion could produce extreme bodily destruction. The personnel ordered to carry out the execution could suffer lasting moral injury.

None of that determines the separate legal question of Hasan’s punishment. It does expose what the firing-squad proposal demands beyond punishment: a deliberately visible performance of state violence.

The foreseeable consequence is not merely revulsion. Hertling and Donovan warned that execution by spectacle could strengthen the martyr narrative Hasan reportedly seeks and make him more useful to extremist recruitment. A performance advertised as dominance could therefore hand propaganda material to the ideology it is supposed to defeat.

The framing lets the fantasy lead

The weakest element of the coverage is its emphasis on whether Trump’s “fantasy” will implode. That framing still grants him the central dramatic role: the strongman conceives a spectacle, then discovers that reality may spoil it.

The more consequential story is institutional. Who inside the government is expected to translate presidential fixation into plans? Who can refuse to treat soldiers as execution scenery? Who calculates the costs, applies Army Regulation 190-55 and accounts for the psychological consequences?

Calling the problem a logistical nightmare risks understating it. Logistics are not an accidental obstacle here. They are the institutional reality that presidential spectacle tries to subordinate.

The state as a personal theater

Donovan connected the firing-squad proposal to Trump’s broader fascination with World War II imagery, including his reported preference for “Golden Fleet” ships styled after an earlier era rather than designs developed through decades of military planning. The pattern is rule by symbol: select an image of past power, demand that contemporary institutions reproduce it and treat technical expertise as an impediment.

But the postwar achievement was not an aesthetic. As Donovan noted, leaders responded to mass destruction by constructing rules, treaties and agreements meant to restrain its recurrence. Appropriating the era’s imagery while disregarding that institutional lesson turns history into costume.

The systemic danger is a government trained to satisfy one leader’s appetite for spectacle. When officials begin evaluating punishment, military design and personnel deployment according to their value as presidential imagery, public institutions cease to serve coherent policy. They become a stage—and everyone below the person giving direction absorbs the cost.

Thanks to Alter Net

Source: Retired general predicts Trump’s firing-squad fantasy will implode