There was no public demand that led to the U.S. military announcing that it would publicly execute someone on livestreamed video (a list of advertisers, if any, during the broadcast has not been released — add your guesses below). No polling favored it. No fashion for being like Saudi Arabia was afloat. Outside of Supreme Court Justices, a return to the 18th century is generally not in vogue. So why do it? I can guess at a few contributing factors.
- They can probably do it. They can’t take over countries. They can’t steal Iran’s oil. They can’t make Greenland a state. They can’t end or make anyone like their wars in Palestine or Ukraine. They can’t own Cuba. They can’t make actual humans with brains believe in the Golden Dome. They can’t stop soldiers from jumping off their ships or murdering girls near bases in Asia. The only things less popular than data centers, ICE thugs, or new nuclear waste sites, are their endless pointless wars. Trump wants to build an arch for a conquering Roman emperor because he renamed a lake or something, but he can’t even do that. This they can do. They can shoot a man with a bunch of guns and watch him die. They can declare victory. They can scream USA USA Number One Number One and justify it with having actually done a thing.
- There was only a small step left. The murders of fishermen on boats are posted on social media. The genocide in Gaza is livestreamed. Mass shootings of the sort that this murder-spectacle claims to be addressing (themselves very disproportionately generated by the U.S. military) receive massive wall-to-wall media coverage beginning moments after they happen. Movies and television shows, which many often struggle to fully distinguish from reality, are saturated with murder, as well as with the glorification of revenge. Viewers have been extensively trained to cheer for good, noble, revenge murders, and to engage in them themselves in video games. In a culture (yes, they have existed) from which an individual could be traumatized by a single clip of a Hollywood movie murder, a public murder spectacle would be a catastrophe of world-shattering proportions. In a society whose largest investment is in an institution called the War Department, this step by that department is much smaller.
- In their tiny little minds they consider this a war against an enemy, and an enemy of the very worst sort — a traitor. In a war, you kill people. You don’t kill certain people in proper ways under certain peculiar circumstances. You kill people. One member of the U.S. military recently felt compelled to confess that he had committed murder in Afghanistan. Don’t worry about it, the Army told him, that was the job. So they’re simply going to kill one more person.
- Re-enactment magic is powerful voodoo for people who believe silly things like the return of Jesus as Trump or the healing powers of Robert Kennedy Jr. In England a few centuries back, people were sometimes punished at the scene of their alleged crime in the manner of their alleged crime. This set the universe aright, although any records of the universe — as opposed to some creepy sadist in a wig — voicing that opinion have been lost to time.
- The era that Trump fans most often refer to as the time referenced in the final A of MAGA (the Great time to get back to) was an era of public lynchings. While they were not livestreamed, they were spectacles evolved from public punishments in Europe, and used to send a message to a certain group of people in the United States who needed to learn their place, as well as to train children and the public at large in the proper treatment of lesser creatures — as well as to fulfill a cycle of violence that included in most cases the violent childrearing of those doing the lynching. The Secretary of War has chosen for his victim someone who can be used to represent a religion and various cultures he despises and encourages others to.
- A video death penalty is a Hail Mary thrown at the wish, not just of high ratings, but also of raising U.S. children in vicious violence today. It engages in the usual hypocrisy of failing miserably at discouraging murder by engaging in and celebrating murder — not just doing it with at least pretended shame, but doing it with pride. That teaches not just murder but all lesser forms of violence as well.
- Trump now knows that he can talk about blowing up Los Angeles or San Diego and his sycophants in Nebraska, or at least some of them, will cheer out loud, at least once. If the small number of people who come to your fascist rallies are the people you want to please and win votes from, then sadism is strategic.
- The forces of toughness on crime are eternally vigilant. Policies that actually reduce crime could break out at any time. We might address poverty, provide conflict resolution, or move toward the certainty of apprehension and away from the extremity of brutality for those unlucky few apprehended. We might get rid of the damn guns. We might refocus courts on restitution, rehabilitation, prevention, or any sort of deterrence that might actually deter something. A public execution erases all such thoughts and replaces them with revenge.
- The death penalty is dying. At least 140 nations no longer use it. No nation in Europe uses the death penalty. No nation in the Western Hemisphere uses it, except the United States. Twenty-three U.S. states, plus Washington, D.C., have abolished the death penalty, and 4 more have imposed moratoriums. And lethal injections in Tennessee have been famously failing to kill. As the holy harbinger of backwardness, Trump can revive the death penalty with his gruesome gun show.
- They don’t think anyone will stop them. They launch war after war, murder after murder. Trump threatens nuclear apocalypse. He intentionally exacerbates climate collapse. He openly steals. He uses public money for personal-glorification ads. The lists of impeachable offenses are longer than the mold-filled reflecting pool. And nobody stops him. Why do emperors act on their disgusting whims? Why does a dog lick its balls?