Donald Trump wants to kill people, and he wants to kill them faster. That is the unvarnished meaning of the Justice Department’s April 2026 decision to revive the firing squad, the electric chair, and the gas chamber for federal executions. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s 48-page report wraps that ambition in the language of duty, deterrence, and closure. The evidence shreds each claim. The National Academies found three decades of deterrence research too flawed to guide policy. Only 2.5% of murder victims’ families report closure from an execution. Alabama’s nitrogen experiments have produced 38-minute deaths so harrowing that three Supreme Court justices dissented in protest.

No free nation does this anymore. Every European Union member has abolished capital punishment — abolition is the price of admission. So have Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and most of Latin America. They looked at the firing squad and the gallows and decided a democracy could not wield them and remain itself.

We are making the opposite choice. The United States now stands shoulder to shoulder with China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea as the world’s leading executioners — and alone among them debates whether to shoot, gas, or electrocute its own citizens in the name of justice.

This is not a policy drift. It is a defection. Brick by brick — from independent prosecution, from judicial review, from constitutional restraint — the United States is dismantling its membership in the community of liberal democracies and taking up residence among the regimes we once defined ourselves against. A government that resurrects the firing squad to vindicate political will is no longer governed by law. It is governed by brutality, with a little legal gloss.