How did the Cheesecake Factory become a memorable metaphor about Donald Trump's gaudy White House?

 Obama’s Great Skewering of Trump published in The New Yorker by Susan Glasser.

Former President Barack Obama's clever riff on Saddam Hussein, the Cheesecake Factory, and our gold-besotted leader was not only funny but also politically brilliant.

Leave it to President Barack Obama to deliver the Democratic line of the midterms, a brilliant if slightly obscure riff on Donald Trump’s home-renovation obsession at a time when Americans wish he would spend more time on the price of groceries than on the amount of gold in the Oval Office. 

“He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” the former President joked during a rally over the weekend in newly competitive Ohio, where his party is hoping, five days from now, to win both the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat just two years after losing the state to Trump by more than eleven points. After Trump and his allies spent days complaining about this supposedly élitist slur against one of Middle America’s favorite restaurant chains, Obama came back with what was arguably an even sharper disquisition on his successor’s misplaced priorities.

“I’m not making this up. He, the President of the United States, is spending time supergluing gold medallions to the mantel in the Oval Office,” Obama said at another rally on Wednesday, this time in suburban Atlanta, making an allusion to one of the more telling revelations in “Regime Change,” a recent best-selling book by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. “He is literally doing arts and crafts while we are fighting a war and trying to deal with out-of-control prices.”

As for the matter of Trump, Saddam, and the Cheesecake Factory, Obama replied with a nearly five-hundred-word skewering of the “whole-of-government response” to his joke. Rather than try to paraphrase its genius, I will merely quote it at length:

"That was the interesting thing about how the Administration responded to the speech I gave the other day. They did not dispute what I said about them being directly responsible for rising prices. Did not argue with that! They did not deny tariffs were contributing to higher costs for families. They didn’t say anything about that! I accused this Administration based on the facts that they were engaging in unprecedented levels of corruption. They didn’t say anything about that! The President wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison. That part didn’t bother him! But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory comments. He took great umbrage. He said I didn’t understand the work of the artisans in the White House."

"And they mobilized. I mean, it’s all crazy, but this was the really crazy part. They mobilized a whole-of-government response to that joke—not to inflation but to that joke! The White House even called the Secretary of the Treasury. This is the man who is in charge of the economy, the person who’s supposed to be figuring out how to make your life more affordable, the guy who’s supposed to be figuring out how to lower inflation and reduce interest rates. They told him he should hold a press conference in front of the Cheesecake Factory. . . . And the Treasury Secretary, he happens to be a former hedge-fund manager worth half a billion dollars. And he was out there in front of the Cheesecake Factory, explaining how he ordered the delicious French-dip cheeseburger instead of the egg rolls. Now, look, this is not something I ever thought of. I inherited this major financial crisis. I never called my Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, and said, ‘Man, you’ve got to go to Arby’s, order roast beef. No cheese, though. That may look élitist.’"

"To everybody out there, including the press, I want you to understand this. This is what I mean when I say these are not serious people. They don’t have solutions to actual problems, so they’d rather have the media and you talking about the Cheesecake Factory."

"More than ten billion 💲dollars has already been spent on campaign advertising in this election cycle, which is projected to be the most expensive in American history. But, among the multitudes, it’s hard to imagine a single TV spot as simultaneously incisive, cutting, and funny as Obama managed to be the other night with this epic retort. Obama himself stopped at least a half dozen times to laugh at his own material. And yet it was also one of the most on-message speeches I’ve heard this fall, pulling together Trump’s unpopular war in the Middle East, rising prices at home, and the entitled indifference of our callous and corrupt rulers into one long, strange story about the Cheesecake Factory. Props to a professional. That is not easy to do."

As Obama was bringing down the house in Clayton County, Georgia, it happened that Trump was taking the stage in Chillicothe, Ohio, for a rally of his own. As if to underscore the split-screen reality of these midterm elections, one of the big questions going into Trump’s appearance was whether he would, as he has done repeatedly in recent days, talk about the impressive backside of Ohio’s Republican Senate candidate, the incumbent Jon Husted. (Trump did, first admitting to “looking at his ass, and it was strong as hell,” then blaming the “fake news” for making fun of him about it.) 

Another unknown was whether Donald Trump would take Obama’s bait, and spend yet more time reinforcing how out of touch with the American public he is by going on and on about his White House renovations. (He did this, too, explaining for a full five minutes why he had to fix the “half-broken” and “terrible”-looking executive mansion and how Obama “doesn’t understand cleanliness, doesn’t understand broken, cracked stone and sidewalk.”)

Perhaps Trump’s signature moment came twenty minutes later, after detours to discuss those (sad 😢) dastardly Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, why Vivek Ramaswamy was right to run what is now an infamous🤢 ad quoting his opponent’s estranged mother, and how he made the Venezuelans give him a million barrels of oil a day, “free of charge.” The subject❓His own cognitive abilities. Like Obama’s riff, it defies easy paraphrase. To wit:

"I’m a very high-I.Q. person. 🤥Don’t forget I’m the only President to pass without exception—I passed three cognitive tests. (💩💩💩- in fact it was a picture screening exam, given to him three times.) I’m the only President that agreed to take them. And they’re hard, you know❓Obama—Obama couldn’t have passed it. Biden we don’t even talk about. Republicans wouldn’t have passed them. I won’t mention names because I’m supposed to be a nice Republican. But I passed them. I got three of them all—and, by the way, you know what they do with the cognitive tests❓ The first one is easy. They have a lion, a bear, a snake, and a camel. They say, which one is the snake, O.K.? That’s question one.

Question two is a little bit—by the time you get up to fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, you gotta be freaking smart to answer. . . . But I passed them. So, no other Presidents agreed to take them. It’s a very powerful test, very highly respected test, very well-known test. Thirty questions, very hard, some of them. After you get to fifteen—oh, after you get to twenty, twenty-five, very few people. I’m one of the only persons. I passed it all three times. I aced it, zero mistakes, all three times. But, no, that’s—that’s the good news. So, I said to the doctor—I think one of the doctors is here tonight. They have a whole team of doctors standing there watching you. ‘Mr. President, take the number sixty-four, multiply it times seven, divide by three, add 1,019, subtract seventy-four, multiply by nine. Sir, what do you have❓’ Now, I know the number to that. Does anybody else know the number to that—it is❓ That was as you got to the end. And that wasn’t as hard as some of them. So—anyway, so I aced it all three times. . . ."

This, to be clear, is a shortened version of Donald Trump's lecture, which omits both a long explanation about how he came to decide to take the cognitive test in the first place and a discussion about his late uncle, the physicist John Trump, who was blessed with “athletic genetics” as well as “smart genetics” and “just got named the No. 1 professor in the history of M.I.T.”

By this point in the rally, Trump had been speaking for nearly an hour, without making any effort to address the issue that is driving this election—voter discontent across the political spectrum with the high prices that he promised to bring down on Day One of his Presidency but which continue to rise owing to the war that he promised not to start. When he did mention the economy, it was all golden-age-this and I’m-so-great-that. “We are making a fortune in this country,” Trump insisted, saying it with such conviction it sounded as though he was thinking of his own ballooning bank account. On a less upbeat note, he warned that if Democrats come back to power, America will be looking at a dim future of “open borders,” “transgender for everybody,” and a “1929-style economic depression.”

Obama, as a campaigner and as a President, always excelled as a teller of hard truths. Trump, in this as in so much else, remains his inverse. If reality is a problem, he’ll just create an alternative. “Now you have the hottest country anywhere in the world,” he told the cheering crowd in Ohio. The pitchman will never stop pitching.

Two Presidents, two Americas. For ten endless years, our politics has been all about the vast gap that separates these two men, and the near-impossible task of trying to understand how a country that elected Obama twice could, so soon after, do the same for Trump. Watching them both on Wednesday night, toggling between screens and alternate universes as they shot barbs at each other, was a reminder of how very long we’ve been stuck in this loop.

What’s different this time is a sense—and, until there are votes counted and races called, it’s just a sense—that real-world events have intervened to make this less of an intractably divided country and more of a place where at least some shared truths are still possible. Perhaps the biggest and most motivating truth is that prices are too damn high, which comes with the corollary that

Trump has no one to blame for this but himself. Headed into the midterms, America is not a fifty-fifty nation on these questions; it is a country where sixty per cent or more of the people disapprove of the President and do not support his policies.David Plouffe, the strategist who helped Obama win election to the White House in 2008, observed the other day that, when a big wave is building in American politics, it’s almost impossible for individual politicians to swim against it. “Voters just shut you out, and that’s what’s happening right now,” he said during an interview at The New Yorker Festival. “When you’re in a landslide scenario against you, your political money and political ads have no capability to compete with reality.”

He and other political handicappers believe that is what is happening to Trump and his Republicans right now. The idea has taken hold so firmly in Washington that much of the talk here is about the Democratic infighting that’s already broken out about how to run the Congress that everyone now assumes the Party will soon win. 

In the prediction markets, there’s currently a sixty-eight-per-cent chance of Democrats winning the Senate and a ninety-two-per-cent chance of Democrats winning the House.

We’ll know if the wave has in fact materialized, if voters in places such as Iowa, North Carolina, and Ohio, which went for Obama before they went for Trump, have decided that enough is enough. 

But on Election Night and beyond, I’ll also be thinking about what then happens to Trump and those who’ve stayed with him in his reality-defying bubble, the folks who were cheering him in Chillicothe, and who’ve been with him the whole long, strange way. Just what is it we think will happen if and when the bubble bursts? ♦

Donald Trump is a cruel creature creating a culture of cruelty fueled by lies backed up my compliance from the MAGA cult

I’ve never seen a more vile and disgusting to watch ad.

Echo opinion by David French published in The New York Times.

By now, you almost certainly know the story. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, posted an ad featuring a malicious attack on Amy Acton, Ramaswamy’s Democratic opponent. The ad starred Acton’s own mother, a woman named Donna Arthur.

The family story here is evil. Arthur married a man named Cledith Arthur, who became Acton’s stepfather. 

Cledith Arthur was indicted when Acton was 12 for raping her. He fled the jurisdiction rather than face charges.

Donna lost custody of her children, and — as Charles Hilu at National Review reported — she has her own criminal history. She was convicted of theft by deception in the 1990s, and accused of animal neglect in 2021.

It’s hard to imagine a more cruel and evil act than raping a child. There is no betrayal greater than the betrayal of a child by a parent. And then Ramaswamy compounded that betrayal by wielding that evil mother as a weapon against her own daughter.

I’m reminded of Sir Thomas More’s famous line in Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons”: “Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales!”

But for Ohio, Vivek❓

Long ago we learned that there is no bottom for MAGA, and there is still no bottom to this scandal. If Ramaswamy had a molecule of decency, he would take the ad down and apologize. Instead, he attacked Acton. “It is an ad from our campaign,” he said. “I would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans. Unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues. She won’t debate me. She doesn’t allow cameras at her events.”

At a rally in Ohio, JD Vance, the former junior senator from Ohio and a former Marine Corps corporal (same rank as Adolf Hitler held during World War One) and the president of vice in the United States, weighed in, praising Ramaswamy. “Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar,” he said. (JD Vance is a Roman Catholic convert❗ By the way, Adolf Hitler was also a Roman Catholic.))

Vance, of course, is no stranger to malicious lies. He trafficked in the slanderous “Haitians eating pets” stories during the 2024, presidential campaign. There was never any credible evidence supporting those claims, yet he spread them anyway — even as Haitians faced death threats as the rumors metastasized across the body politic.

At the time, Vance told CNN, “If I have to create stories, aka "lies" 🤥 so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” (By the way, to lie deliberately and to admit you are telling lies is a serious sin.)

After Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, denounced the Ramaswamy ad (though he did not withdraw his support for Ramaswamy), President Trump took to Truth Social, condemned DeWine as a “RINO,” and said: “The Press is trying to convince everyone that this Ad is bad, because it’s so good! Who wouldn’t use such an Ad❓ I would, it’s called, ‘hitting pay dirt.’ ”

At a rally, Trump said that he told Ramaswamy to “leave it up and look upstairs and say, ‘Thank you God very much, I appreciate it.’ ”

“I only wish I could have had an ad like that against somebody,” he said.

If there were a column hall of fame, Adam Serwer’s 2018 essay in The Atlantic called “The Cruelty Is the Point” should hold a place of honor. Rarely has a single piece so completely captured the zeitgeist of a movement.

Trump’s “only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty,” Serwer wrote. “It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright.”

Serwer wrote those words eight years ago, when cruelty was already central to the entire MAGA enterprise. Trump supporters delight in Trump’s cruelty, of course, but they also engage in their own vile speech and actions as a virtual initiation rite into the MAGA movement — it’s the way that they demonstrate that they have the courage necessary to take on the left.

Indeed, in a Truth Social post, Trump applauded the “courage” of Acton’s mother. Vance, as I said, praised the ad’s “audacity.” (In other word, the audacious lies🤥)

This perversion of the concept of courage is central to the MAGA ethos. In MAGA’s account of history, the Republican Party before Trump was a collection of cowards and quislings — people who knew the right thing to do but refused to do it because they were desperate for the approval of progressives.

That’s the origin of the famous (in conservative circles) “D.C. cocktail party” smear — the idea that conservative convictions crumble the instant that conservatives get access to elite institutions or the moment that they get the first taste of elite approval. I’ve faced this accusation for more than a decade, ever since I said I could never support Donald Trump as the Republican nominee.

In other words, there are no genuine arguments about policy or morality; there are only two kinds of people: the strong and the weak. (Vance accused Republicans who condemned the ad as “whining.”) Or as Shane Vaughn, a Trump-supporting pastor, said in an online rant defending Ramaswamy: “Quit being soft. Quit being gay. Quit being spineless. Quit falling. We are in a war!” And one way to tell that you’re strong is if the left loathes you. The more the left hates you, the more righteous you are.

In fact, this is a less obvious reason for evangelicals’ continued support for Trump. From a young age, evangelicals are taught that they’ll be hated by the world. They’re taught to prepare for persecution, and when the secular left is angry at them, that’s treated as proof that they’re on the righteous path. It’s a message I heard for much of my life.



In the words of a common saying I’ve heard on the right, “If you’re taking flak, it means you’re over the target.”

As a result, there is a powerful incentive to intentionally trigger outrage. That’s how you establish your credibility. There’s nothing new about this — The Daily Wire, a right-wing media company, has long sold a tumbler that says “LEFTIST TEARS” for example — but with every passing year it gets worse.

A cohort of far-right supporters of Vance, for example, are fond of using the acronym WAGTFKY, which stands for a cruder version of “we are going to kill you,” as a kind of in-group signaling of their own hatred and aggression. They’re living examples of Vance’s own morality. During his campaign for Senate, he made his values clear — “I think our people hate the right people,” he said. 💢😱🤢

And then he put his hatred into practice, in one of the most powerful offices in the land.

That behavior should be self-defeating, and as a potential blue wave looms in November, it might be. Many Republicans are growing very weary of Trump and — crucially — of Trump’s most aggressive supporters. 

One thing that was very clear when I traveled to Texas to report on the U.S. Senate race between Ken Paxton and James Talarico is that a meaningful number of Republicans were seething with anger and resentment toward MAGA. They were tired of being bullied. They were tired of MAGA’s corruption. Some were even open to voting for Democrats.

But they were also extremely reluctant to go on the record.

And that shows exactly how MAGA survives. Every act of resistance to MAGA carries a profound cost. The bullies are loud, the good people are often quiet, and when the good people do summon up the courage and decency to decry hatred on the right — as DeWine and many of my friends at National Review have done — they often face the wrath of the president of the United States. They will be the “RINO” in one of Trump’s vicious rants.

Given enough time, every institution takes on the character of its leader. Trump is a cruel creature, he leads a cruel movement, and only the total defeat of both can free the nation from their malign control.

Donald Trump's illegal election interference must be stopped!

Trump Is Sabotaging the Midterms. The Supreme Court Must Stop Him.

To the Supreme Court:  "Where are you❓"

Donald Trump has a long record of threatening rather than protecting the integrity of American elections. 

At his worst, he sought to overturn the 2020, results. 

Trump attempted to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger into reinvestigating the state's 2020, election results, despite being repeatedly told that there was no electoral error. Trump's repeated efforts to convince Raffensperger to find some basis to overturn the election results were perceived as pleading and threatening. At one point on the call, Trump told Raffensperger, "What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state."

During the Raffensperger call, Trump falsely suggested that he could have committed a criminal offense by refusing to overturn the state's election results.

Now he is menacing the midterms, with an executive order that would throw voting by mail into chaos if it went into effect.

It is up to the Supreme Court to prevent that. Nearly one in three voters now votes by mail. 

Trump’s order has already sown doubt about whether Americans can continue to trust the Postal Service to deliver their ballots and prompted bipartisan alarm from states and local election officials. The sooner the court puts Trump’s ill-advised directive to rest, the better.

Trump’s order is illegal. He does not have the authority to set the rules for election administration. The Constitution gives that role to the states, with Congress providing oversight. “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations,” Article I states.

As a bipartisan task force said in 2021 in response to a relatively minor executive order from President Joe Biden, “Presidents don’t have much of a role in how elections are run — and that’s a good thing.” Nevertheless, Trump ordered the Postal Service in March to decide which voters would receive mail-in ballots, a decision that states have always made for themselves.

His order is also a recipe for bureaucratic chaos. It would force states to send lists of eligible voters to the Postal Service, with each voter’s information attached to a unique bar code. Even minor discrepancies between the information on the list and the information on a ballot envelope could lead to somebody not being able to vote.

Tracking ballots via bar codes can have benefits when election officials have sufficient time and funds to set up a system. It allows voters to see how their ballots are moving through the mail. But, Trump’s rushed order is pretending to solve a problem that does not exist. He claims it will prevent voter fraud, which is vanishingly rare in the United States.

Rather than making elections more secure, the order would inject turmoil. Many jurisdictions would need far more time than they have to comply with the new rules for a November vote. And while the Postal Service has had a stellar record of delivering ballots quickly, it has no experience or expertise in making decisions about the appropriateness of sending ballots to millions of people. It has already been struggling this year with timely ballot delivery.

A Postal Service employee’s whistle-blower report became public this month, warning that the new system could reject an entire batch of ballots, numbering in the thousands, if even one bar code did not scan properly. Anybody who has used a self-service counter at a supermarket understands how common bar code problems are. The whistle-blower raised “grave concerns” that the change could cause major disruptions.

The order could lead some voters who request mail-in ballots not to receive them, while also slowing the election process. “There is a low but nonzero chance that in a state with a nail-biter congressional election, someone will discover 50,000 ballots at the post office on the Wednesday after the election,” said Charles Stewart III, the director of the M.I.T. Election Data and Science Lab. The risks are biggest in states where most voters now vote by mail, including California, Colorado and much of the rest of the West. The numbers are also significant in Maine, Michigan and Ohio, where Senate races are tight, as well as Pennsylvania and other states with close House races.

During the decade that Trump has been at the center of American politics and spread lies about supposed voter fraud, he has repeatedly failed in his efforts to corrupt voting. Voter turnout in the past two presidential elections was higher than in any other in at least 40 years, and his illegal attempts to overturn the 2020 result failed. This executive order, however, has the potential to alter the midterm elections unlike anything else he has done.

Whether Trump's illegal order will help his party win in November is not clear. Rural districts, which tilt Republican, are more likely to lack the equipment needed to comply with the Postal Service’s rule. But urban districts, which lean Democratic, could also struggle, given their size, and there is reason to think the Trump administration may target them unfairly, given its record. It is uniquely unsuited to be trusted with fairly overseeing elections. In any case, the partisan implications of Mr. Trump’s order should not matter. It is wrong because it could prevent many Americans of any political affiliation who are eligible to vote from doing so.

It already has caused some Americans to begin wondering whether they should shift from mail voting — which has been convenient and reliable — to in-person voting. Some may end up not casting any ballot as a result. Others who would prefer to vote by mail may go to the polls on Election Day, contributing to long lines, which can also reduce turnout. The president’s executive order is a direct threat to this year’s elections.

Lower courts have twice blocked the order in response to lawsuits by voting rights groups and more than 20 states. Last month, the Supreme Court lifted that ruling on procedural grounds, saying that the litigation was premature because the Postal Service had not issued a rule to carry out the order. The service finalized the rule late last month, and the case is now awaiting the justices’ decision.

They should act quickly — within days. This Supreme Court has stood up to Trump’s election interference before, refusing to hear his allies’ appeals to overturn the 2020 election. But the six Republican-appointed justices have in other cases been naïve about his pattern of illegal, anti-democratic behavior. They have too often imagined that they were dealing with a president who would follow their rulings in good faith. This case presents a classic example. By refusing to rule so far, the Supreme Court has allowed confusion about the midterms to spread.

Nothing is more important to democracy than free and fair elections. Our country has built a system in which Americans can have confidence. Trump is trying to wreck it. The Supreme Court must protect it.

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have zero regard for human life. Both men have exhibit a creepy attraction for killing people

Facing the Death Penalty:  The cases of Christa Pike and Nidal Hasan show how vanishingly fine the line is between a routine execution and an unbearable one. Published in The New Yorker,  Amy Davidson Sorkin.

Tolerance (or intolerance) for the death penalty, as it is carried out in the United States, has been sorely tested twice during recent weeks. On September 30th, the state of Tennessee bungled its attempt to kill Christa Pike, who survived two injections of pentobarbital. Eight days later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gleefully invited the nation to tune in, via live stream, for the death by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, scheduled for December 3rd. It took another week for Donald Trump to call off the broadcast, amid an uproar. He said, in a Truth Social post, that, though he thought a live stream would send a useful message about America’s strength, he accepted that “many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch.” He made it sound like a programming preference, not a moral one.

Pike’s botched execution did not result in Tennessee looking strong. Though the event was not public, there were watch-rooms connected to the death chamber. In one sat May Martinez, the mother of Colleen Slemmer, who was nineteen years old when, in 1995, Pike, then eighteen, beat and killed her, with the help of two teen-age accomplices. A group of journalists, designated as “media witnesses,” sat in another. At 7:26 P.M., according to the journalists, a black curtain fitted to a large glass window was pulled back, and they saw Pike strapped to a gurney. Prison personnel had already set I.V. lines and left the chamber to begin the flow of pentobarbital from yet another room.

Through a microphone, the journalists listened as Pike spoke what were meant to be her last words—about love—and sang with her Buddhist spiritual adviser. Then they heard her ask if her arm was supposed to hurt as much as it did—as if her veins would burst. She raised her head and kicked her legs, knocking a sheet off the gurney. At 7:46 P.M., the curtain was closed. It was opened three minutes later, presumably so that the witnesses could see the effects of a second, backup dose. What they saw was a woman who was clearly alive.

At 8:05 P.M., the curtain closed again, but the microphone stayed on, leaving the journalists with the sound of Pike’s labored breathing and snoring. When, at 8:53 P.M., they were finally told to go, they were pretty sure that Pike was not dead.

“I cannot emphasize enough how much of whatever just happened happened behind a closed curtain,” Steven Hale, of the Nashville Banner, said at a press conference afterward. In the days that followed, more details came out. Before the curtain opened, according to Pike’s lawyers, medical workers had struggled with the I.V., using at least seven needles. A working theory is that a line was misplaced, or that a vein was blown, causing the pentobarbital to spread into the surrounding tissue. Pike’s lawyers had warned, in court filings, that she had blood and circulatory conditions that put her at risk for precisely this outcome. (They have also argued that sexual violence Pike endured as a child should have weighed more heavily in her sentencing.)

Lethal injection is the most common method of capital punishment in the U.S. And yet, according to the Associated Press, I.V. problems have derailed more than half a dozen executions since 2009, including one in Tennessee this past May. Pike’s case stands out because the execution team proceeded with the injection of pentobarbital anyway. The level of recklessness in that decision will no doubt be a focus of the investigation that Bill Lee, the governor of Tennessee, has ordered. Lee delayed other pending executions, but he has not yet said if the state will try again to kill Pike, who was unconscious for several days before waking up in a hospital, confused and in pain. It’s unclear if she will fully recover. Last week, it emerged that even the call from the prison for an ambulance was mishandled. Pike’s lawyers have described what happened to her as torture. An unanswerable question is how the night might have ended had no one been watching.

There is a distinction, of course, between insisting on witnesses and staging a spectacle. Hegseth promoted the live stream in an interview with Jack Posobiec, a right-wing influencer, on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. Hasan, a former Army major and psychiatrist, shot and killed twelve fellow-soldiers (one of whom was pregnant) and a civilian at Fort Hood, in 2009, ahead of a deployment to Afghanistan. “No-brainer. Execution by firing squad,” Hegseth said. “And we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public.” There hasn’t been a public execution in the United States in almost ninety years. Hasan is confined to a wheelchair; he was paralyzed as a result of the firefight that ended his shooting spree. He has said that he wants to be a martyr, and one of the many problems with Hegseth’s plan was that it might have helped him get his wish. But the more profound issue was the grubby death-cult revelry that a live stream would entail.

Even some supporters of capital punishment, including a number of Republican lawmakers, seemed repelled by the prospect. In recent years, only a few countries have been known to conduct public executions, notably Iran and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, of the thirty-eight nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only two—the U.S. and Japan—regularly carry out death sentences at all. (China, which is not in the O.E.C.D., does, too.)

The Eighth Amendment forbids “cruel and unusual punishments”; the Supreme Court has long said that the death penalty is permissible, even as it has gradually tightened its standard. In 1988, for example, the Court banned the death penalty for crimes committed by someone under the age of sixteen. The Justices only raised the age to eighteen in 2005. But such adjustments, welcome as they are, cannot conceal the essential brutality of the enterprise; the Pike and Hasan cases show how vanishingly fine the line is between a routine execution and an unbearable one.

When Markwayne Mullin, the Secretary of Homeland Security, was asked about Hegseth’s live stream before Trump called it off, he said, “No one has to watch.” In the age of TikTok and autoplay videos, that’s simply not true. But Mullin’s reply also seemed to convey a hope that no one would notice the actions and the character of this Administration, with officials, such as Hegseth, who appear unashamed of their worst instincts. One can’t always look away. ♦

Published in the print edition of the October 26, 2026, issue, with the headline “Death Watch.”