Death is an obsession with Donald Trump who exploits his fixation for causing harm to others: His support for the death penalty is another dire example of Trump's cruelty

Donald Trump’s death penalty obsession: As with most other developments in the Republican Party, it can be traced back to Donald Trump. Echo opinion published in The Boston Globe by Theo Zenou:

The president’s bloodlust is filtering down to red-state America.

Theo Zenou is a historian and a journalist.

This has been a trying year for Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. Every time someone is executed at Florida State Prison, activists hold a vigil outside the death chamber. They say prayers and, at 6 p.m., the time of execution, they ring a bell. In 2025, they have rung the bell 17 times.

Florida’s 17 executions are more than have taken place in any other state, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, and are by far the highest number carried out in a year in Florida since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976. 

But the grim record is about to be topped. On December 9, another inmate is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection.

This acceleration in executions is due to Governor Ron DeSantis, who signed the death warrant and set the execution date in each case. In Florida, unlike other states, this is the prerogative of the governor. Although juries vote for death sentences, DeSantis — and DeSantis alone — decides whether those sentences are actually carried out. In the past, Florida’s governors have held off on signing specific death warrants. As a result, some inmates have spent decades on death row.

“I support capital punishment because I think there are some crimes that are just so horrific the only appropriate punishment is the death penalty,” DeSantis, who has led Florida since 2019, said in May. The Republican believes that the execution spree could serve as “a strong deterrent” against violent crime. 

When he was asked by reporters why he had signed fewer death warrants earlier in his tenure — none between 2020 and 2022, six in 2023 and just one last year — he said he had other priorities to deal with, chief among them the COVID pandemic.

But it’s not hard to imagine another reason for DeSantis’s enthusiasm for the death penalty. The governor is reportedly eyeing a 2028 presidential run, and he could be flexing his muscles to impress the Republican electorate. Taking a hard line on crime has long been popular with conservatives. In recent months, however, the rhetoric has escalated. Take Texas Governor Greg Abbott. After two undocumented immigrants allegedly killed an Air Force cadet in a jet-ski hit-and-run, he tweeted: “Welcome to Texas. Here’s your Death Penalty.” Almost all 44 executions carried out this year in the United States, the highest figure in 15 years, occurred in red states, with 76 percent concentrated in Texas, Florida, Alabama, and South Carolina.

As with most other developments in the Republican Party, it can be traced back to Donald Trump. The president has long been a proponent of capital punishment. Back in 1989, when he was just a New York real estate developer, Trump took out ads in the city’s newspapers calling for the executions of the Central Park Five — men accused of raping a Central Park jogger. “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY,” screamed the all-caps headline. As it turned out, the Central Park Five were later exonerated.

Not that it has stopped Trump from bringing that same gung-ho approach into the Oval Office. The president has been hell-bent on expanding capital punishment at both the federal and state levels — even when his efforts flout the law. This hasn’t made headlines, but it is another sign of the United States’s troubling slide into illiberalism.

Trump claims that his stance enjoys “broad public support.” But that’s not the case. Public support for capital punishment is actually at a 50-year low, according to a recent Gallup poll, with just 52 percent of Americans in favor. Thirty years ago, it was 80 percent.

At present, the death penalty is legal in 27 states and at the federal level. But before this year’s 44 executions and counting, it had become less common. There were a total of 25 in 2024. None were performed by the U.S. government since Joe Biden imposed a moratorium on federal executions in 2021. Even prior to that decision, only a small number had been carried out in the 21st century. The lone exception was during Trump’s first term, with 13 executions.

Now, Trump is back with a vengeance. On January 20, the first day of his second term, he overturned Biden’s moratorium and signed an executive order titled (all caps again) “RESTORING THE DEATH PENALTY AND PROTECTING PUBLIC SAFETY.” 

In it, Trump painted a picture of sinister conspiracy. “For too long,” he wrote, “politicians and judges who oppose capital punishment have defied and subverted the laws of our country.”

No longer. The president, who once told his supporters that “I am your retribution,” was committing himself to delivering that retribution. He called on Attorney General Pam Bondi “to pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use.” He also ordered Bondi to systematically pursue death sentences in the murders of law enforcement officers and all capital crimes committed by undocumented immigrants.

This has already had consequences on the ground. Although there have been no federal executions this year, federal prosecutors are seeking capital punishment in as many as 20 cases, according to the Federal Capital Trial Project. Luigi Mangione’s, the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan, is the most high profile defendant. 

Although the state of New York abolished the death penalty in 2007, the federal government is still able to seek it for any capital crime committed there. Bondi’s justification was simple: “We carry out Donald Trump's agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.”🤢

The Department of Justice is aggressively considering bringing capital charges in additional cases. In the process, the DOJ is testing the limits of due process. Under federal law, defendants are entitled to a “reasonable opportunity” to present mitigating evidence for why they should not face a death sentence. This can be due to physical or mental health issues or a history of trauma. Typically, this mitigation phase lasts around a year.

But the DOJ is now giving defense lawyers as little as two months to make a case for why their clients deserve to live. 

Payments to court-appointed mitigation specialists were also paused during the government shutdown. “This is really unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” Mairead Burke, a mitigation specialist based in the District of Columbia, told The Washington Post.

In October, a New Mexico murder defendant facing a capital sentence filed an emergency motion demanding that the process be paused until funding is resumed. His attorneys argued that the situation amounted to “a deprivation of his right to counsel while the government seeks his death.” The DOJ denounced their “strained reasoning.”

Not even inmates whose death sentences were commuted by President Biden are safe from government overreach. Trump has said online he wishes for them to “GO TO HELL!” Bondi has done her best to oblige and moved most of them to a Colorado prison so harsh it is known as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies.” As Aaron Seitz, a former US assistant attorney general, told the Wall Street Journal: “If you’re not going to be killed lawfully at the hands of the state, well, your prison sentence is going to be hard as hell.”
But Trump’s impact has not just been felt at the federal level. In his January 20, executive order, he also directed Bondi to “encourage” states to seek capital punishment in all applicable cases. Cut to 11 months later and Republican state legislators are obediently doing his bidding. Nine states are currently trying to reinstate the death penalty, according to The Hill, while bills to expand the definition of capital crimes — for instance, to include pedophilia — are on the floor of 14 state houses.

Here too, Florida has been leading the pack. In February, DeSantis signed a bill into law automatically requiring capital punishment for “unauthorized aliens” convicted of a capital felony. That requirement for capital punishment — juries would have no say — is believed to run afoul of the US Constitution. The law’s sponsor, Randy Fine, a former state senator, is hoping that the conservative Supreme Court won’t strike it down. But that doesn’t appear to be his primary concern. His motivation for the law was to show loyalty to Trump. “We wanted to make sure that the state was lined up to follow in President Trump’s lead,” he said.

For decades, America has stood as an outlier among Western democracies for continuing to impose capital punishment. But Trump’s hard-line approach cannot be dismissed as business as usual. Yes, past Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were vocal supporters of the death penalty. But they didn’t flout legal norms the way Trump does. He has not simply defended capital punishment in theory. He has used the bully pulpit to demand the executions of specific individuals, disregarding both their right to a fair trial and the independence of the courts.

His push to expand capital punishment is not happening in a vacuum either. It needs to be understood as part of a broader attack against the rule of law. The president has made illiberalism his credo. He has unleashed the National Guard on U.S. cities. He rails against judges whose decisions he disagrees with. And he treats Immigration and Customs Enforcement like his personal special forces.

Similarly, Trump treats the death penalty as his personal prerogative. It has now become routine for the president to publicly call for the execution of murder suspects. After the Ukrainian refugee Irina Zaratuska was murdered on a train in August, Trump raged on social media: “The ANIMAL … should be given a ‘Quick’ (there is no doubt!) trial, and only awarded THE DEATH PENALTY.” But the president does not even need someone to be accused of a crime to demand their head. He acts like he is judge, jury, and executioner. Recently, after a group of Democratic lawmakers released a video saying soldiers should not obey unlawful orders, he went online to inveigh against “traitors.” His verdict: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

Such rhetoric is irresponsible. For one thing, in the case of murder suspects, it is clearly prejudicial and threatens the integrity of the judiciary. For another, it turns capital punishment into a grisly form of entertainment. This breeds a desire for vengeance among the wider public. At any time, this is bad for a healthy society. But at a time when political violence is flaring up, it is downright dangerous.

Since his return to power, Donald Trump has been carrying out a carpet-bombing campaign against America’s institutions. Call it the shock and awe approach to governing. It is easy, amid the chaos, to miss some of the damage being done. That has certainly been the case with the Trump administration’s expansion of capital punishment. Because it directly affects only a few individuals, it has elicited little public outcry. But it is no less concerning. Trump’s obsession with “THE DEATH PENALTY” betrays the destructive impulse at the heart of his presidency.