Sen. Mark Kelly demanded Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s immediate removal over a plan to livestream the firing-squad execution of Fort Hood killer Nidal Hasan, calling the move a glorification of violence.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) pressed the Trump administration on Friday to fire Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at once, citing the Pentagon chief’s reported plan to livestream the military execution of former Army Maj. Nidal Hasan.
The Hill reported that Hasan, the convicted Fort Hood shooter, is set to be put to death on Dec. 3. It would be the first U.S. military execution in more than 60 years, carried out by firing squad.
Kelly framed the livestream idea as something closer to the public spectacles of Iran and the Taliban than to American justice. He said the administration should be “delivering for the American people,” not “glorifying violence,” and tied the dispute to Hegseth’s “maximum lethality” push.
Hasan was convicted of killing 13 people and injuring dozens on a Texas military base in 2009. Kelly did not dispute the conviction or the sentence. He objected to how the sentence would be carried out in public view.
"There is no doubt that Nidal Hasan is a murderer who took the lives of 13 people and injured dozens. He should face justice for that. But a public execution? Here in the United States?"
Kelly posted that message on X and went further, calling for Hegseth’s removal “immediately.”
Kelly also invoked former President Ronald Reagan to scold the administration’s tone and priorities.
"As President Ronald Reagan said ‘compassion, vision, and a fundamental sense of decency are the hallmarks of our national character.’ That is not what we’ve seen from this President and his administration. We need to find that again."
That line came from the same push in which Kelly urged Hegseth’s ouster. It was not Kelly’s first demand that Hegseth leave. He has called for the defense secretary’s resignation before.
Kelly is also suing the Pentagon. The dispute centers on a censure and a move to lower his retirement rank after he appeared in a video reminding troops they must refuse illegal orders. Defense officials have argued Kelly was urging service members to defy lawful directives. The senator’s latest attack on Hegseth lands on top of that open fight.
Kelly was not alone in objecting. Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) warned that turning an execution into a broadcast spectacle would corrode public character and fail as deterrence.
"A civilization erodes when it cultivates an appetite for executions as a form of entertainment. Secretary Hegseth’s plan to livestream the Fort Hood execution risks feeding that appetite. The victims deserve justice administered with solemnity. Broadcasting a death diminishes us and is not an effective deterrent. I urge him to reconsider."
Curtis cast the victims’ need for justice as real and the method of public display as the problem. He stopped short of demanding Hegseth’s removal.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) called the execution plan “beyond disgusting.” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-N.Y.) suggested Hegseth could be mimicking ISIS-style killings. Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, called the publicization of capital punishment a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death.”
Those reactions treat a lawful military death sentence for a mass killer as a culture-war flashpoint. Hasan’s 2009 rampage on a Texas base left 13 dead and dozens wounded. A military court convicted him. The sentence is death. The date now attached to that sentence is Dec. 3.
The core facts of the crime are not in dispute in this fight. Hasan, a former Army major, murdered 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009. He injured dozens more. He has sat under a death sentence while the military justice system moved toward the first military execution in more than six decades.
Hegseth’s reported plan would show that sentence being carried out by firing squad and put the proceedings on a livestream. Critics call that a descent into entertainment and a gift to America’s worst examples abroad. Supporters of firm military justice see a convicted mass killer finally facing the penalty a court imposed, with the public able to see the system finish its work.
Kelly’s demand goes past the method. He wants Hegseth gone now. He links the livestream fight to a broader claim that the administration is failing basic decency and chasing lethality for its own sake. He does so while locked in his own legal battle with the same Pentagon he says should sack its leader.
Curtis, Tillis, Murphy, and Coakley aimed their fire at the broadcast itself. Kelly aimed his at the man running the building. The difference matters. One argument is about how a lawful execution should look. The other is a Democratic senator’s bid to force out a Trump defense secretary over it.
Hasan’s victims were soldiers and civilians on a U.S. base. Their families have waited through years of process for the sentence to be carried out. A livestream does not erase the 13 dead or the dozens wounded. It also does not turn a court-imposed military execution into the random street violence of the regimes Kelly named.
Justice for Fort Hood’s dead is not theater because cameras exist. It is justice because a jury and a military system found Hasan guilty of mass murder and handed down the law’s hardest penalty. Officials who finish that work are doing the job the victims were denied in 2009.
Senators free to lecture about decency might first explain why a convicted base shooter still drawing breath this long after 13 funerals is the scandal they want to own.
