President Donald Trump said Wednesday that people who leak military information should be shot, calling them the “scum of the earth.”
“In my opinion, leakers should be shot,” he told a rally in Arizona. “In the old days, we used to shoot leakers.” He said a raid on Iran had to be called off after details about the operation appeared in the media, in an apparent reference to strikes on nuclear sites last year.
He also criticized the media, pointing at journalists covering his rally and saying, “They’re almost as bad as a leaker.”
Though Trump has previously railed against leaks, saying in July that he endorsed pursuing reporters who receive leaked material, his latest comments marked a stark escalation in his campaign against leaks to the media.
Trump has pursued intense efforts to hunt down people who share information with reporters, including an FBI raid on the home of a Washington Post reporter in January and subpoenas to New York Times journalists in July. Many of his moves against reporters have been curtailed by judges, though investigations into officials who are allegedly leaking have proceeded.
It wasn’t clear which military operation Trump was referring to in his complaint about leakers, although he mentioned the June 2025 surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has launched aggressive leak investigations inside the Pentagon, at times using polygraphs on his top aides. But a wide-scale effort was halted after one aide complained to the White House.
Trump has also embraced the federal death penalty after the Biden administration imposed a moratorium on the practice. In December, his administration plans to use a firing squad to execute Nidal Malik Hasan, a former Army major who was convicted of a 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas. Trump on Thursday reversed plans to live-stream that execution.
“Many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device,” Trump said on Truth Social.
The death penalty has seemed to be on the president’s mind in recent days. On Thursday, speaking at an event in the Rose Garden, he spoke in favor of executing people who kill police officers and expanded the list of people who should face the death penalty, saying that “anybody that murders a firefighter going up a ladder, and they shoot him, and they go to, they go away for three months for some reason. Death penalty.”
“Todd, okay, if we can do that,” he said, turning to Attorney General Todd Blanche. “The shootings will stop very quickly.” It was unclear what shootings Trump was referring to.
Trump was in Bullhead City, Arizona, on Wednesday to back the Republican gubernatorial nominee, Rep. Andy Biggs, ahead of the midterms. However, he spent relatively little time talking about the economy, despite residents’ struggles with the rising cost of living.
At the rally, Trump expressed exasperation with the media’s focus on affordability, saying that “the prices are all coming down” and that the war in Iran would “end very soon.”
The post Trump says people who leak military plans ‘should be shot’ appeared first on Washington Post.
