Donald Trump has been forthright about his intention to bring about a death-penalty renaissance, and now his efforts are coming to fruition. This year has been a particularly lethal one for America’s death-row prisoners. Together, Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have executed a total of 40 people in the past 10 months by injection, nitrogen hypoxia, and firing squad, surpassing 2024’s total of 25—a significant spike in an otherwise-downward long-term trend. Trump’s return to power—and the Republican Party’s resurgence more generally—is driving a heavy push for more death sentences and more executions. He has restored the federal death penalty following the prior administration’s moratorium, and Republican state legislatures have sought to expand the list of crimes punishable by death and to allow new execution methods.
Capital punishment is central to Trump’s authoritarian approach to criminal justice. His pro–death penalty views emerged decades before he ascended to the presidency. In 1989, he bought full-page advertisements in The New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and New York Newsday calling for the alleged perpetrators of a gang rape in Central Park to be sentenced to death. In the text of his ad, Trump blasted Ed Koch, the New York City mayor at the time, for being soft on crime, both spiritually and practically. “Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts,” Trump wrote. “I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” He repeated the ad’s headline—“BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY AND BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”—by way of conclusion above a now-familiar signature. The five men accused of the Central Park gang rape were later exonerated.
When Trump arrived at the White House, federal executions had not been carried out in more than 17 years—a hiatus Trump promptly dispensed with, presiding over 13 executions in the last several months of his first term. Joe Biden, clearly troubled by those events, issued commutations to 37 of 40 people on federal death row during his last weeks in office, which prevented Trump from picking up where he left off when he returned to the White House. Trump responded furiously online: “As soon as I am inaugurated,” he swore on Truth Social, “I will direct the Justice Department to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters. We will be a Nation of Law and Order again!” He did just that. On January 20, Trump signed an executive order intended to reinvigorate the death penalty both federally and at the state level, instructing his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to pursue federal death sentences when possible, and to encourage and assist states in carrying out executions.
On cue, several states set about realizing Trump’s dreams, Florida chief among them. Under the direction of Governor Ron DeSantis, the state has carried out a record 14 executions so far in 2025, with plans for more before the year is over. Maria DeLiberato, the executive director of the nonprofit organization Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, told me that this pace of executions is unprecedented in Florida’s recent history, and that DeSantis has now ordered more executions in a single year than any other governor in Florida history.
DeSantis has also overseen efforts to alter Florida’s death-penalty statutes to require mandatory death sentences for any undocumented person convicted of a capital crime, signing a bill in February that would wrest the decision away from juries. Last month, Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, wrote a letter to Bondi and White House counsel Dave Warrington asking Bondi to fight to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana, which held that pedophilic sex offenders could not be sentenced to die unless their crimes either resulted or were intended to result in the death of their victims. Doing so would expand capital crimes to include categories other than murder, creating new avenues for states to pursue death sentences. “We have every confidence that, with President Trump’s strong leadership and with principled, rule-of-law Justices on the Supreme Court,” the letter reads, “child rapists can be appropriately punished for their unspeakable crimes.” Officials from 15 states co-signed.
The Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments,” but states attempting to rack up executions and death sentences can be reasonably sure that the Supreme Court will not stop them. “There has been a clear signal from the Trump Supreme Court that it will not be enforcing constitutional guarantees in death-penalty cases,” Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, told me, citing this Court’s unwillingness to intervene in states’ efforts to pursue executions using arguably cruel and unusual methods. Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, pointed to the decline in stays of execution issued by the Supreme Court this year relative to prior years as another sign of this Court’s friendly posture toward capital punishment. “The Supreme Court has stepped way back from its historical role in regulating use of the death penalty in the states and staying executions where they are troubled by the circumstances,” Maher said. Alabama’s execution of Anthony Boyd last week is a clear example: Though Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in a dissent joined by Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson that Boyd’s execution via nitrogen suffocation would likely be torturous, the Court declined to entertain his final appeal. Sotomayor was nevertheless proved right, as Boyd’s execution became the most protracted nitrogen execution in history.
In this permissive environment, efforts are already under way to resurrect the death penalty in jurisdictions that have previously suspended or banned it. Trump has announced plans to revive capital punishment in Washington, D.C., despite the fact that the practice was abolished by the city council in 1981, and residents later overwhelmingly rejected a 1992 referendum to reinstate capital punishment within its borders. When Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was stabbed to death on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, in August, Trump weighed in to demand the perpetrator be sentenced to death, though North Carolina has not carried out an execution in 17 years. “The ANIMAL who so violently killed the beautiful young lady from Ukraine, who came to America searching for peace and safety, should be given a ‘Quick’ (there is no doubt!) Trial, and only awarded THE DEATH PENALTY. There can be no other option!!!” Legislators in North Carolina got the message, and swiftly passed a sweeping piece of legislation titled “Iryna’s Law” aimed in part in resuming executions and expediting the state’s death-penalty-appeals process. “What’s happened this year is that the Trump administration has attempted to open the floodgates when it comes to executions,” Dunham told me. Considering the success it has had in just the first nine months of Trump’s second term, the worst may be yet to come.
Trump’s abiding interest in capital punishment is not incidental to his overall politics, but seems rather to be an expression of several of his apparent animating impulses: his will to achieve profound and concentrated personal power, for one, and his tendency to channel the conservative id, for another. Trump’s political project is unabashedly authoritarian, as is evident in the prosecution of his enemies, his battles with the free press, and his deployment of the military in major American cities. He seems intent on suppressing the elements of society he considers unfit or dysgenic, and the death penalty maximally empowers heads of state to control civilian populations—which is why countries that still practice executions tend to have authoritarian governments, as in Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea. “The death penalty has always been political,” Maher told me. “If you look back through history, we have thousands of years of examples of how the death penalty is used by different regimes to repress dissent or to punish opposition.” And Trump’s demands for capital punishment appear closely entwined with his political ambitions. After the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was murdered last month, Trump called for the death penalty before law enforcement even had a suspect in custody, and later said at Kirk’s memorial service, “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them,” an echo of his 1989 screed against Ed Koch.
Predicting how far Trump is willing to go to create a more lethal justice system is difficult. If he intends to rely on popular support for his mission, he might find that public opinion about the death penalty does not match his zeal. In 2024, capital punishment merited a 53 percent approval rating—a 50-year low, which suggests that the American people may be less interested in the death penalty than their elected representatives are.
But perhaps that won’t matter: The spike in executions could represent a temporary increase brought about by a political fad, or an omen of an even more brutal future. Trump has allegedly mused in the past about group or televised executions. And though people frustrated with the secrecy surrounding American executions occasionally suggest that if the goings-on inside death chambers were better known, then people would reject the practice, I suspect that significant portions of the public would enjoy the exhibition. When public executions were common, they were widely attended, and I see no reason to believe humans have generally improved in moral quality since those days. The worst-case scenario is that Trump manages to whet the public’s appetite for executions either by featuring them prominently in his rhetoric or by escalating them to spectacles, thereby fashioning a revival in popular demand from his own private fixation.
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