New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill has a new reason to be upset with the Trump administration: the scheduled execution of Nidal Hasan, the terrorist who murdered 13 people and wounded more than 30 others at Fort Hood in 2009. Her objection? Hasan is in a wheelchair.
Hasan is set to be executed by firing squad on December 3, the punishment handed down for his attack on American soldiers at the Texas military base. The Obama administration originally classified the massacre as "workplace violence," a designation that infuriated veterans and families of the victims for years. Now, under President Trump, the sentence is finally being carried out.
Sherrill, a Democrat who took office as governor in 2026, appeared Friday on MS NOW's "The Weeknight" with former RNC Chair Michael Steele to discuss the case.
"I think the thing, as I think about it, that just keeps breaking my heart, imagine the 20-year-old, imagine, maybe, the 18-year-old, that stepped up to serve, that gets orders and says, you're going to go shoot this guy who's in a wheelchair," Sherrill said. "Imagine feeling like, I don't know what to do here. Now, I believe in justice. I'm a former federal prosecutor. This is not justice. This is about trying to create some pageantry around something that should never be treated like that, that is disrespectful to soldiers, and that is incredibly offensive to most of us who've served."
The comments were flagged by RedState, which noted the obvious: Hasan is in a wheelchair because police shot him during his rampage, stopping him from killing more people. His confinement is a direct result of his own actions.
Sherrill is a former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor, and she leaned on that background in her remarks. But her argument that the execution is "disrespectful to soldiers" glosses over who the victims were: soldiers, sailors, and civilians gunned down at a military processing center, many of them preparing to deploy overseas.
The White House has not responded publicly to Sherrill's comments. The execution is scheduled to proceed in early December.
Social media users quickly piled on. One X post from @ezradulis shared the clip of Sherrill's remarks, drawing attention to the wheelchair comment specifically. "Democrats always leave out key and vital information," one commenter wrote, according to RedState's roundup of reaction. Others questioned why Sherrill's sympathy was directed at the killer rather than the families of the 13 dead.
The timing is notable. The Trump administration has made clear it intends to carry out federal executions, and Hasan's case has been a symbol of delayed justice for more than a decade. For veterans and military families, the firing squad sentence is not pageantry. It is the conclusion of a long, frustrating process that began when Hasan's attack was downplayed by the previous administration.
Sherrill's office did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
Our Take
Let's get one thing straight: Nidal Hasan is not a victim. He is a terrorist who murdered 13 Americans in cold blood, and he is in that wheelchair because a brave officer shot him before he could murder more. Sherrill's attempt to turn the execution into a question of sympathy for a mass murderer is the kind of moral confusion that has become a trademark of the modern Democrat Party.
She says it's "disrespectful to soldiers" to order them to shoot a man in a wheelchair. What's disrespectful to soldiers is pretending that the man who gunned down their brothers and sisters in uniform deserves their pity. What's disrespectful is treating the execution of a terrorist as a spectacle to be fretted over on cable news, rather than a long-overdue act of justice.
The men and women who will carry out this sentence are professionals. They are not children who need Sherrill's hand-wringing. They understand what Hasan did, and they understand what justice requires. The only thing breaking hearts should be the memory of the 13 dead and the 30 wounded, not the fate of the man who killed them.
December 3 cannot come soon enough.
