Dennis Hendrickson
Navigating Politics · October 10, 2026

JD Vance Says He Won't Watch Hegseth's Planned Execution Livestream

The vice president backs the death penalty for Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan but breaks with the Pentagon over turning the execution into a public broadcast.

Vice President JD Vance was asked on Friday about War Secretary Pete Hegseth's plan to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army major convicted in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting. Vance did not share Hegseth's enthusiasm. He said he has seen the announcements but is not sure it will actually happen the way Hegseth describes it, though he expects Hasan will be executed in December. That is a different tone than Hegseth, who told Real America's Voice this week, "We'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public."

Vance still backed the death penalty itself, calling the 2009 attack, in his words, the worst terrorist attack on American soil outside of 9/11. Hasan opened fire at a crowded Readiness Center at Fort Hood, killing 12 soldiers and one civilian and wounding 32 others, in what the record describes as a jihadist-inspired terror attack. Vance's objection, as far as he stated it, was to the method and the spectacle, not to the sentence.

A Rare Split Inside the Administration

The execution is reportedly approved by President Trump for December 3, and Hegseth has been insistent the livestream will go forward. But the plan has drawn pushback from both parties, which is unusual for this administration. Republican Senator Thom Tillis said, "Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting." Pope Leo XIV, marking World Day Against the Death Penalty on Saturday, called capital punishment "inadmissible," arguing it attacks human dignity, a statement aimed squarely at the Pentagon's plan.

The last public execution in the United States happened in 1936 in Kentucky. Outside the U.S., public executions are associated mainly with Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan, which is the company Hegseth's critics say this plan puts the country in.

The Attention This Story Pulls Away From Paychecks

Here is my take on what this does outside the politics of it. Every day Washington spends litigating how an execution gets staged is a day not spent on hiring, small business costs or the price of anything a working family buys. Congress and the administration only have so much bandwidth, and a controversy built like this one, with a Pope statement and a Republican senator breaking ranks, is going to dominate that bandwidth for days. For job seekers and small business owners watching the news for signs of what's coming on taxes, tariffs or labor rules, this crowds that out.

There's a livelihood angle to this too. Commentary writers, cable hosts and the accounts arguing about it online draw real traffic and real income from exactly this kind of fight.

That post captures the gap between how official Washington debates this, through constitutionality and precedent, and how a lot of regular people are reacting to it, with plain anger. Both reactions are genuine, and both get monetized by whoever posts them well. That's not a knock on anyone, it's just how the attention economy works now, and it's worth knowing when you're deciding how much of your own day to give a story like this.

A Lesson From Running a Business: Backlash Finds the Owner Who Goes First

I've run my own insurance agency and my own marketing company long enough to know what happens when the person at the top makes a call the rest of the organization hasn't bought into. Hegseth announced this plan publicly and personally, the same way a business owner sometimes rolls out a policy before checking whether their own team or customers are actually with them. When that happens, the backlash doesn't stay contained to outside critics, it splits your own side too. That's exactly what happened here, with Tillis breaking from his own party and Vance visibly distancing himself from the method while still defending the sentence. Any owner who has rolled out a decision solo and then watched their own people pull back knows that feeling. It's a management failure as much as a political one.

What to Watch Before December 3

My advice if you're following this: don't assume anything here is locked in. Vance's comments alone show this isn't settled policy inside the administration, and pressure from both parties plus the Pope's statement gives the Pentagon room to quietly change the plan without admitting it changed. Watch the official statements as December gets closer, not the original announcement.

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