As President, when told the January 6 insurrectionists wanted to “hang Mike Pence,” Donald Trump reportedly told advisors that perhaps his vice president “deserves” it. On the campaign trail, and even as far back as 2018, Trump has called for the death penalty for anyone convicted of selling drugs. And as President, Trump oversaw the largest number of federal executions in more than 120 years.
If elected again to the White House, a President Trump would install mass executions, including by firing squad, hanging, and possibly even guillotine, according to a report by Rolling Stone.
“What do you think of firing squads?” Trump has repeatedly asked close associates, Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng and Patrick Reis report, citing several sources. Trump has even “mused about televising footage of executions, including showing condemned prisoners in the final moments of their lives.”
Trump has railed against President Joe Biden, publicly and privately, but in private he appears to lament he did not have enough time in office to greatly expand the death penalty.
“Trump privately mused about the possibility of creating a flashy, government-backed video ad campaign that would accompany a federal revival of these execution methods,” Rolling Stone report, referring to firing squads, hangings, and guillotine. “In Trump’s vision, these videos would include footage from these new executions, if not from the exact moments of death.”
“The [former] president believes this would help put the fear of God into violent criminals,” one source told Rolling Stone. “He wanted to do some of these [things] when he was in office, but for whatever reasons didn’t have the chance.”
A former Trump White House official told Rolling Stone, “In conversations I’d been in the room for, President Trump would explicitly say that he’d love a country that was totally an ‘eye for an eye’ — that’s a direct quote — criminal justice system, and he’d talk about how the ‘right’ way to do it is to line up criminals and drug dealers before a firing squad.”
That official also quoted Trump as saying, “You just got to kill these people.”
In 2019 VICE published a compilation of “Trump’s Long Love Affair With the Death Penalty.”
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