Trump is staging Hasan’s execution while the Fort Hood families have waited seventeen years.
Let me tell you what Hasan did, because the plain facts matter. On November 5, 2009, he walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood — the place where soldiers go to get cleared to deploy — armed and shouting “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great.” He opened fire. He killed twelve U.S. soldiers and one civilian worker. He wounded thirty-two more. He never denied it. At his court-martial in August 2013, he told the panel he was “defending Taliban leadership in what he said was the United States’ war with Islam.” A general court-martial found him guilty of thirteen counts of premeditated murder and thirty-two counts of attempted premeditated murder and sentenced him to death.
Now I’ll say the part that needs saying plain. That sentence was owed. Hasan murdered American soldiers who were getting ready to deploy and a civilian worker who was on the job. He said he did it on purpose, for a cause. I’m not going to pretend I have a problem with the verdict. The system did its job that day, and it did it right.
Here’s what the system did after that. It sat on the sentence. Seventeen years since the shooting. Thirteen years since the court-martial promised those families a day. The widows, the parents, the children did what working families in that position do. They called. They wrote. They waited on hold. They watched the calendar turn. Seventeen Thanksgivings with an empty chair. Seventeen years of a folded flag in a drawer. The government that could not find a way in seventeen years to give those families a closed book found a firing squad in about a month, the minute the boss in the Oval Office decided he wanted one.
That’s the part that ought to make working people’s blood run cold. When the powerful want a show, the machinery moves. The approvals, the announcements, the scheduling — all of it happens in weeks. But ask that same government for a straight answer on a survivor’s claim, ask for a caseworker to call you back, ask for the clinic to stay open past four — that paperwork sits in a stack. It’s the same Washington that can set a date for a killing and can’t process a claim without three years and a lawyer. The state is fast when the cameras are on and slow when the people on the other end are just working people trying to get through.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said “Judgement day for Hasan has finally come.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth typed one word: “Justice.” Not a word about the families. Not a word about the seventeen years. They were talking to the cameras, not to the people who have waited for this longer than anyone in Washington has held their job. The date and the place will be set by the Secretary of the Army, Adam Telle. That’s how it works — one boss picks the method, another boss picks the day, and nobody asks the families what they’ve been carrying.
I’m not going to argue the death penalty here. That’s a debate with a long history and good people on both sides. What I know is that a widow is not a prop and a mother who buried a soldier is not scenery. The families were used once by the delay and now they’re being used again by the spectacle. The execution is dressed up as a television program with the president as the star and their grief as the backdrop.
Now, I’m just a simple man, but I know the difference between a promise kept and a show put on.
The boss in the Oval Office is the same man who oversaw more federal executions in his first term than any president since Franklin Roosevelt. He dusts off a firing squad — the first military execution since Private John Bennett was hanged in 1961 — in a month when his approval numbers have cratered. Ask yourself what the sixty-year pause meant to the men who run Washington. It meant the pause was the only decent thing the system did in this case, and even the pause wasn’t for the families. It was because nobody got around to it.
It’s the same story everywhere you look. The same Washington that found a firing squad in a month has spent years telling working towns the money isn’t there. The clinic closes early. The school roof leaks. The veterans’ office has a phone tree and nobody who answers. But when a boss needs a headline, the money and the speed appear out of nowhere. Dwight Eisenhower warned the country about the rise of misplaced power — power that stops serving the people and starts serving the men who hold it. This is what he was talking about. The machinery built to defend the country has become a device for a boss’s satisfaction.
The right thing was never complicated. Carry out the lawful sentence, mark it in the record, and let the families close the book. That’s the least the country owes the men who wore the uniform and the families who buried them. Instead the boss wanted a show, so the families get a show.
The date will come, and the firing squad will do its work. When the cameras leave, the families will still be there — only now they’ll know what they were for. Seventeen years of waiting, and in the end their grief was used for a show. The dead soldiers earned better. The families earned better. The sentence was owed, and the people who waited for it should have been treated like people.