‘Deus Vult’. That, famously, is what the large tattoo on Pete Hegseth’s right bicep says. The phrase, which means God Wills It, is a Crusader reference. Critics suggest the words have white supremacist connotations; Hegseth, formerly a major in the Army National Guard, believes it means fulfilling the Almighty’s plan to defeat America’s enemies.
But what does God want? That’s a difficult question for mere mortals to answer. Does He want to see terrorists executed by firing squad on video live-streams for all the world to see? Because that’s what Secretary of War Pete desires.
There’s no doubt that Hegseth enjoys the language of lethality
Nidal Malik Hasan, the Islamist who killed 13 and injured 32 more at Fort Hood in 2009, is due to be executed by a military firing squad on December 3, near the site and at the same hour of his terrible crime. President Trump reportedly approved the killing – which would be the first army firing squad execution in America since 1945 – on October 2, just two days after the botched lethal injection on Christa Pike in Tennessee. It’s not known if those two facts are in any way connected. The timing seems curious, though, or divinely ironic.
‘We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,’ said Hegseth this week. The Secretary, who is also fond of the FAFO (Fuck Around, Find Out) meme, appears to relish the spectacle of violence. He has repeatedly posted videos of military attacks on Narco-trafficking boats in and around the Caribbean. In November last year, the Washington Post reported that he ordered his commanders to ‘kill everybody’ in a follow-up missile strike on the survivors of an already targeted vessel near Trinidad. The White House denied he used those words. But there’s no doubt that Hegseth enjoys the language of lethality. ‘We decided to share the ocean with the Iranian Navy,’ he is fond of saying. ‘They got the bottom half.’ In the early days of the Iran war, there were concerns that Hegseth and Trump were consuming too much war-porn footage of enemy targets exploding – and blinding themselves to the negative consequences of Operation Epic Fury.
Trump has long been a fan of capital punishment. In 1989, he took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times saying: ‘BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY’ – his response to the notorious Central Park jogger case. Now in his second term as President, he has been pushing for more state-level executions. In January 2025, at the start of his second administration, he signed the Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety executive order, which urged the Justice Department to pursue more executions. In April 2026, the department restored something called the ‘pentobarbital protocol’ – pentobarbital being the drug used on Christa Pike – and added firing squads as a legitimate federal execution method. The Hasan case is the first military death sentence that Trump has signed. But for the US government, through the Pentagon, to endorse an internet livestream of a judicial killing is something entirely new.
The execution may well face legal delays and be pushed on past 2028, when a new administration would be in charge. But if it goes ahead as planned, would Hegseth or Trump post out the live link on their social media feeds? It wouldn’t be all that surprising if they did.
The last public execution in America was the hanging of Rainey Bethea, a 22-year-old black man convicted of raping a 70-year-old white woman, in 1936, before the advent of regular TV broadcasting. Newspaper editorials at the time called the execution a ‘carnival of sadism’. Quite what the internet-addled public of 2026 would make of Hasan’s last moments is an open question.
Another question to consider is why the US should want to so publicise the last moments of Hasan, a fanatic, who was paralysed in the attack and who has told military mental health workers that he could ‘still be a martyr’ if executed by lethal injection. Given that ISIS-inspired terrorists so often claim to ‘love death more than you love life’, and tend to have a penchant for their own video executions, wouldn’t broadcasting Hasan’s brutal end be something of an own goal? The footage, many Islamists might conclude, would be exactly what Allah wanted.
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