‘This death comes to you live’: Trump’s blood and circuses
Pollice Verso, 1872 oil on canvas by Jean-Léon Gérôme, features a gladiatorial contest and spectators at the Colosseum in Rome. The gathering includes bloodthirsty Vestal virgins and the emperor in his box. The painting was a source of inspiration for the 2000 film Gladiator. Photo: Public domain
Sanguis et circenses. Had Juvenal been alive, the satirist would’ve found material aplenty in Trump’s America.
Donald Trump has gone beyond Juvenal’s summing up of the moral decay (and lay misery) that marked the Roman empire. Debased or not, there was a logic of sorts in bread and circuses, panem et circenses. The grain dole offered sustenance. Rome’s state-sponsored gladiatorial contests and chariot races doled out pap, made to a strict recipe – entertaining fare, devoid of nutritive value in terms of educational or artistic merit.
Thus did Roman emperors balance the formula.
President Trump is changing the equation. Affordable bread is not a priority, the issue demands too much focus. US food prices are up 33 per cent since 2019 and a July poll found that more than half of Americans are struggling to afford groceries.
Instead of bread, Mr Trump is fine with blood and circuses. A firing squad on livestream is the greatest show of them all.
The execution of former US Army major Nidal Hassan, who shot dead 13 people at a military base in 2009, was set for December 3. The Trump administration has decreed it will be by firing squad and livestreamed to the world.
The last public execution in the US was 90 years ago.
The last by firing squad was 81 years ago.
The timing of Trump’s livestream of death will mark it out. The proposed event will be a spectacular, a high-impact act designed to generate massive publicity and attract maximum attention.
In the 21st century, only Afghanistan and Iran still have public executions. Even North Korea seems not to make it a practice.
In fact, the last account I could find of an execution by firing squad in North Korea was back in July and only a small group of military officials were present. There seems to be no way to verify the accuracy of the report, but it says that “a top North Korean colonel was executed in front of his officials for stealing the military’s reserve grain”. It quoted a source to say his execution “in front of members of his unit” had a profound effect on the men who witnessed the shooting. They “left without making eye contact with each other”.
The effects of a public execution – free to watch – on individuals and wider society have been addressed by many, not least the head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Paul S. Coakley. He said it is deleterious to promote a “culture of death”. Quoting St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, he said, “The public execution even of one who has done grave harm will only further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people”.
In fact, even abrasive and contrarian commentators such as Glenn Greenwald have pointed out that the Trump livestream will set new records of depravity. Mr Greenwald wrote on X that “…not even the Nazi defendants sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials had their executions televised (it was deemed violative of the human rights that post-WW2 institutions were trying to re-establish)”.
He added that Nidal Hasan is paraplegic, so the spectacle will involve “rolling him out in a wheelchair, then live-streaming his body as it’s pumped full of bullets”.
Clearly, Trump’s America does not see the past even as a manual for the present, but as prelude…to greater excesses.
