Pentagon says Hegseth backs Trump’s call to drop the Hasan execution livestream
Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell says the president and the defence secretary talked before the Truth Social post and are completely aligned.
By
Callum Fairbairn
In brief
- Donald Trump used Truth Social to announce that the execution of Nidal Hasan would not be livestreamed.
- The Pentagon issued a response to the president’s decision.
- Spokesperson Sean Parnell said Pete Hegseth supports the decision.
- The Pentagon is the only party quoted reacting to the cancellation.
The Pentagon has insisted that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stands fully behind Donald Trump’s decision to drop the livestream of Nidal Hasan’s execution, saying the two men discussed it before the president went public.
The statement came from Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, in a reply reported by The Guardian in a live blog published on 16 October 2026. The newspaper also pointed readers to a related piece by its reporter Anna Betts.
A presidential post, then a departmental reply
The sequence matters for understanding the Pentagon’s message. Trump made the call himself and chose his own social network, Truth Social, as the place to announce it. Only afterwards did the Department of Defense weigh in, with a short statement that addressed a single point: whether the department’s political leadership had been consulted and whether it agreed.
That framing tells readers what the Pentagon chose to speak about. Its reply concerned the relationship between the president and his defence secretary, rather than the substance of the decision itself. No explanation for scrapping the broadcast was offered in the response, and the department did not set out any new arrangements for the execution.
Parnell’s office is the main public voice of the department, so a statement issued in his name carries the weight of an official position rather than an informal comment from an aide.
What Parnell said about the two men
The spokesperson’s statement was brief and built around two claims. The first is about timing: according to Parnell, Trump and Hegseth talked through the matter before the Truth Social announcement was made. The second is about agreement. In full, he said:
“President Trump and Secretary Hegseth spoke about the decision to not livestream Hasan’s execution ahead of the Truth Social announcement. The Secretary supports the President’s decision, and they are completely aligned.”
Sean Parnell, chief Pentagon spokesperson
The wording is careful. It describes the decision as the president’s, and casts Hegseth’s role as one of support. By stressing that the conversation happened in advance, the statement presents the defence secretary as informed and consulted, rather than learning of the change at the same moment as the public.
The phrase “completely aligned” goes further than simple acceptance. It asserts that there is no daylight between the White House and the Pentagon on this question, which is the message the department evidently wished to put on the record once the president had spoken.
Who is speaking, and who is not
So far, the Pentagon is the only institution whose reaction has been quoted on the cancellation. No statement from the White House beyond Trump’s own post, and no response from other parties, featured in the reporting of the department’s comments.
That leaves Parnell’s account as the single official description of how the decision was reached between the two men. It rests on his word as the department’s chief spokesperson: the conversation he describes took place privately, and he is the one reporting both its timing and its outcome.
Hasan’s name appears in the statement only as the subject of the execution whose broadcast has been called off. The Pentagon’s reply, published as part of The Guardian’s rolling coverage of US politics on 16 October, focused entirely on showing that the president and his defence secretary had acted together.
Photo: Szabó Viktor / Pexels
