| Ever since he began flirting with politics, Donald J. Trump has been a death-penalty enthusiast. In response to 1989’s infamous Central Park jogger rape, Trump spent $85,000 taking out full-page advertisements in the New York press calling for the suspects to be killed. ‘BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY,’ it said. ‘I want to hate these murderers and I always will,’ said the then 42-year-old real-estate mogul. ‘I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them. I am looking to punish them.’ Trump has never changed his position on ‘the Central Park Five’, even though in popular culture they are now known as ‘the Exonerated Five’ and often held up as innocent examples of racial bias in law enforcement. Now, in his second presidency, Trump appears to be making good on his promise to bring back capital punishment. Last year, executions in the US surged to their highest level in 16 years, almost double the number of Joe Biden’s last year in office. A total of 47 people – all men – were put to death in various states. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis oversaw a state-record-breaking 19 fatal punishments in the last 12 months (up from just one in 2024). Louisiana, meanwhile, carried out its first execution in 15 years – and decided to use the relatively new technique of nitrogen hypoxia, which is said to be painless, though witnesses report that dying men appear to be in visible distress for up to 20 minutes after it is administered. It’s no easy thing to kill a man. Since all these executions were carried out at state level, signed off by state governors, it’s not quite correct to say that Trump is directly behind the steep rise in judicial homicides, though his influence is clearly at work. On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order on ‘Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety’, which aimed to reverse Biden’s moratorium on death row sentences. He also directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to pursue the death penalty for ‘all crimes of a severity demanding its use’. The order is probably what prompted Bondi to push for the execution of Luigi Mangione, the young man accused of shooting dead the health insurance CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024. Trump’s order also encouraged state and district attorneys to seek more death sentences. This despite the fact that, according to analytics company Gallup, support for capital punishment has declined among Americans from around 80 per cent in 1994 to just over 50 per cent today. Yet among Republicans what’s notably increased is a willingness, even an eagerness to advocate for what they see as righteous violence. WAGTFKY (‘We Are Going To F***ing Kill You’) is a right-wing meme, usually typed alongside an image on social media of Vice President J.D. Vance, Melania Trump, or Trump’s son Barron. It’s not entirely a joke. Pete Hegseth, the Defense (also now War) Secretary, and senior director of counter-terrorism Dr Sebastian Gorka like to brag on the airwaves about the ‘lethality’ of their operations against terrorists and drug smugglers. It’s what the boss wants. When it comes to serious crimes, forgiveness does not enter the Trump lexicon. At Charlie Kirk’s memorial, just after his widow Erika had publicly forgiven her husband’s assassin, the President took to the stage. ‘He did not hate his opponents,’ he said. ‘That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry, Erika.’ In the last six months of his first term, Trump signed off 13 federal executions – the most in more than a century. As he approaches what should be his last three years in the White House, who would bet against him doing more? |
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