It hasn’t been making a lot of news lately, amid all of the disarray in the United States, but Donald Trump has had, what The Guardian magazine called “a campaign to reinvigorate judicial killings” in that country. In 2025 in the United States 47 men and no women were executed for crimes.  That was almost double the previous year. That is also the highest number since 2009. Ed Pilkington in The Guardian used rather colourful language to describe it as “the greatest frenzy of capital punishment bloodletting in America since 2009.” The word “frenzy” seems a bit excessive to me.

Of course, we must remember, Obama was president in 2009. It was his first year in the presidency.  So if I want to blame Trump for 2025, and I do,  I must to be fair blame Obama for the executions in 2009. Obama, my favourite president, was also called “the deporter-in-chief.”. He also launched targeted assassinations by drones. He was no pansy when it came to killing. But he was no Trump either.

I am picking on Trump because he seems so keen on the official killings. On his first day of office in the second of his 2 terms as president he issued an executive order “restoring the death penalty.” I think he was referring to Biden who commuted the sentences of all but 3 convicted killers on death row in his last year as president.

Trump bragged about the change. He seemed to take glee in it. Just as he took glee in having his armed forces blast supposedly drug laden boats off the coast of Venezuela, invariably killing everyone on board.  Trump likes to show himself off as the tough guy, the strongman. What better way to do it than kill people?

Sister Helen Prejean, who is a well-known advocate for abolishing the death penalty and the author of Dead Man Walking on which the film by that name was based, described things in the US this way: “It’s in the air, it’s in the national rhetoric sent down from Trump—you use violence and cruelty to solve social problems.” That’s the point I want to make. America is a violent society. That does not mean everyone in that country is violent. Apparently 55% of Americans no longer support the death penalty. But violence this pervades America.  Killing people is still very popular—too popular in my view—in that country.

And of course, in America the killing cause is ably assisted by the very conservative US Supreme Court. Last year that court denied every request it received to stay an execution. Not one was granted. None, they thought, deserved mercy.

As if life in an American jail is mercy.