Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s bombshell firing-squad plan is set to backfire — and leave President Donald Trump shot in the foot, political experts contend.
Hegseth’s stunning revelation that he intends to live-stream the execution of convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan represents a “huge gamble” — in a game neither he nor Trump knows how to play, constitutional law professor Beau Baumann told Raw Story.
“The whole thing reeks of desperation,” Baumann said. “Hegseth and Trump, they’re really bad at politics.”
Just five days earlier, Hegseth told podcaster Jack Posobiec of Pizzagate fame that Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people and injuring 32 others during a military base shooting in 2009, would be executed on Dec. 3 at Fort Hood.
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth said, “because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”
The proposed execution has since been dubbed a “snuff film” and been compared to an act of terrorism — but Baumann has a loftier term for Hegseth’s gambit, one French philosopher Michel Foucault described in his 1975 text “Discipline and Punish” as the “spectacle of the scaffold.”
According to Foucault, such grotesque displays of corporal punishment — crucifixions and beheadings, for example — historically served to legitimize political authority with impossible-to-ignore displays of power that fascinated and entertained.
Such “shock punishments” served as a mass-marketing scheme, designed to create the impression that the public supported the state in its fight against a common enemy, as Law and Legal Theory Professor Bryan Druzin argued in his 2015 exploration of Foucault’s text.
“There is a link between the retention of shock punishment and the perceived legitimacy of a government’s rule,” Druzin wrote.
“Governments that feel their authority is threatened find shock punishment’s expressive power appealing in the face of political insecurity. Thus, authoritarian and semi-authoritarian States consistently tend to employ shock punishment. This is nothing new.”
In conversation with Raw Story, Baumann, a professor at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, argued Trump and Hegseth easily meet these criteria, as both idealize authoritarian values but struggle to execute them with competence.
As proof, Baumann pointed to Hegseth’s problematic performance at the Pentagon, where he has fired top military officials, stalled promotions for qualified service members who are Black and/or female, and obsessed over the optics of beards and the questionable power of testosterone.
“They’re not very good at building things, so they use the military as a space to enact their political imaginations,” Baumann said.
“All fascist politics in action are about making this kind of absurd fiction, this fantasy in their minds, a reality,” Baumann said. “The act of playing them out, doing these little dress rehearsals and plays that match their fantasies about making real the unreal.”
For Hegseth, the fantasy is manliness, Baumann argued.
“Whenever that guy is involved…everything really goes back to gender,” Baumann said. “He always brings it there. He just has this like macho reverie.”
That “macho reverie” might be why Hegseth so far appears unimpressed by concerns raised by his conservative colleagues, that the promise of a public execution could radicalize and/or traumatize Americans with its apparent cruelty.
Foucault would argue, and Baumann concurs, that the cruelty is the point.
“If you’re Hegseth, and this is just how your brain works,” he said, “an imposition of raw force…of military officials clad with huge rifles? That’s kind of the point.”
But of fundamental concern to Baumann is that raw force will hit a man of color — a point which has already drawn bleak comparisons from powerful political pundits.
“That’s a lynching,” Jamelle Bouie, the New York Times columnist, responded. “Lynchings, as a practice, were as much about reveling in the violence, reveling in the torture, reveling in the spectacle as an end in and of itself.”
Baumann threw support behind Bouie’s analysis, arguing the spectacle, given the context of America’s documented history of approximately 4,400 racial-terror lynchings between Reconstruction and World War II, was more likely to horrify than inspire.
“It’s a huge gamble,” Baumann said. “The cruelty of the act is the point, so you kind of have to go all the way for it to work, right? But that just means it’s a riskier proposition.”
Even if Trump and Hegseth are able to convince Americans this “spectacle of the scaffold” did not constitute a public lynching, they’ll face another more serious problem, Baumann told Raw Story.
And that problem is a bad one to have ahead of November’s midterm elections.
“Usually you want to do a big spectacle like this when you have the wind, you have the momentum — and they’re way past that point,” Baumann told Raw Story.
“They’re incredibly unpopular, and they’re unpopular for tangible reasons that affect people’s lives. So like this little cosplay of justice against this supposed apostate to the state? It can come off as superficial…I kind of suspect that that’s how it would play out.”
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