Back in 2015 and 2016, one of the things that Trump was running on for the Republican nomination and then the presidency was bringing back the death penalty or doing the death penalty in a big way. He would talk about how much he loved the death penalty and how much he, uh, thought that we're not doing enough about it now. And, you know, you gotta get quote unquote 'tougher on criminals'. And this is one of the things I'm gonna do. And, anybody who googles Donald Trump's name with the term death penalty or cap punishment, uh, knows that it's been a major fixation of his for years, if not decades. You can argue that his first major political foray in Manhattan was when he took out actual newspaper ads, calling for the execution of the Central Park Five. We obviously know how those individuals were later on cleared, and how Donald Trump to this day refuses to apologize for any of that, or, or admit that, 'maybe I got that one wrong and I shouldn't have called forthe executions of these not guilty and cleared individuals'.

Journalist Asawin Suebsaeng discusses his Rolling Stones articles "Twitter Kept Entire 'Database’ of Republican Requests to Censor Posts " and "Trump Plans to Bring Back Firing Squads, Group Executions if He Retakes White House".

Image: B.P. Schulberg Productions / Preferred Pictures Corporation, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Guest

Asawin Suebsaeng

@swin24

Asawin "Swin" Suebsaeng is a senior politics reporter at Rolling Stone magazine. He was previously a White House reporter for The Daily Beast, and prior to that, worked in the Mother Jones magazine's Washington, D.C., bureau covering the intersection of politics and pop culture.

Before that, he was a reporter at the Bangkok Post in Thailand, where he covered the summer of the Red Shirt crisis and military crackdown. He appears regularly on radio and TV, including on MSNBC, where he primarily discusses his reporting on the modern American right-wing, GOP, and Trumpism.

In February 2020, the Penguin Random House imprint of Viking published his book, which Swin co-authored with investigative reporter Lachlan Markay, Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump's Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington, which Kirkus Reviews called "a dishy takedown of the mediocrities, charlatans, and grifters populating the corridors of power in D.C."

Swin and his wife — Reason magazine senior editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown — are lecturers and professional affiliates at the University of Cincinnati's journalism department.

Trump 2024 wants to Make Executions Exciting Again? / Asawin Suebsaeng

Asawin Suebsaeng