Execution TV? Pete Hegseth has taken the once ‘greatest democracy’ to a horrific new low | Paul Daley

A proposal to livestream the killing of Nidal Hasan by firing squad opens a window ever wider to the Trump administration’s complete moral vacuity More fool me! Here I was thinking nothing that America’s Trump administration could do or say, no matter how politically and morally bankrupt, no matter how venal or violent, was capable of shocking me any longer. Then I woke to today’s news that one of the Trump cabinet’s bigger boofheads – the uber Christian nationalist, crusader-fantasist and “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth had announced that America would have a public firing squad execution of murderer Nidal Hasan.

Reckless global militarisation including a threat at the UN to annihilate Iran, a litany of sexual misconduct allegations against the commander in chief, claims of blatant presidential corruption … they have all ceased to surprise and shock us, so inured has the world become to Donald Trump’s