Donald Trump stood in front of a rally crowd in Bullhead City, Arizona, on Wednesday and said it three different ways: “In my opinion, leakers should be shot. They should be shot,” then “Some sleaze-bag, they ought to go to jail or be shot,” and finally that leakers “are the scum of the earth.” He added a history lesson, “In the old days, we used to shoot leakers,” and tied the whole riff to his claim that a leak forced him to push back the June 2025 strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites by two days. Most of the write-ups stopped at the quote and filed it under the rally-season category of things he says. Few of them opened the statute books, which is a shame, because the federal law that covers leaking national defense information, 18 U.S.C. § 793, says anyone convicted “shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.” Ten years. Not a firing squad.
There is a death penalty in the Espionage Act, and it is worth being precise about where it lives. It sits in the next section, 18 U.S.C. § 794, which covers handing defense secrets to a foreign government, and even there a death sentence requires a jury finding that the betrayal got a U.S. agent identified and killed, or that it directly concerned things like nuclear weaponry, war plans or major weapons systems. A staffer telling a reporter that a strike date slipped is not that, and no prosecutor alive would pretend otherwise. As for “the old days,” the executions Americans actually remember are Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s, in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1953, for passing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union. That was spying for a foreign power. The shooting of leakers that Trump remembers is not in the record.
You will also find section 793 in a document with Trump’s own name on it. In June 2023 a federal grand jury charged him with 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information under that very statute, each carrying up to ten years, after boxes of classified material turned up at Mar-a-Lago. Judge Aileen Cannon threw the case out in July 2024 on the ground that the special counsel had been improperly appointed, so no jury ever weighed it. By the standard he announced in Bullhead City, the man at the microphone would have qualified for the firing squad thirty-one times over. By the standard the law actually sets, he was eligible for a trial he never got.
None of this is new language for him, which is the part that should worry you more than any single rally line. In September 2023 he wrote that General Mark Milley’s calls to his Chinese counterpart were “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”, and Milley later said he was taking measures to protect his family. Former aide Alyssa Farah Griffin has said he called for leakers to be executed in his first term too. What has changed is the setting. Wednesday’s remarks came days after he approved the firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, and while his administration orders polygraphs for staff and military personnel and news outlets field subpoenas over leaked stories. Words like these are not aimed at the leaker, who is usually unknown. They are aimed at every official deciding whether to return a reporter’s call, and at scale that is how a government stops being checked.
Here is where we land. A president who says the people who tell the public what the government is doing should be shot is not venting about national security, and nobody owes him the charitable read that he was joking. He is setting a price on talking to the press, and the price he named is higher than anything Congress ever wrote into law, including for him. Republicans who would never accept that sentence from a Democrat should say so out loud before November 3, and the newsrooms he singled out, The New York Times and CNN, should keep doing exactly what got them singled out.