Rolling Stone on one of Trump’s more hideous triumphs:

By 9:27 p.m. Bernard was dead. In that moment, he became the ninth of 13 people executed in the final six months of the Trump administration — more federal executions than in the previous 10 administrations combined. Of the 13, six were put to death after Trump lost the election, his Justice Department accelerating the schedule to ensure they would die before the incoming administration could intercede. Before Trump, there had been only three federal executions since 1963; in January 2021, Trump oversaw three executions during a single four-day stretch.

In short Trump is a serial killer. The killings were legal, but they were far from legally required. Trump and his people made haste to do the killings while they still could. Trump chose to have 13 people killed. He’s not legally a murderer, but he’s killed more people than your average murderer.

As he geared up for another election, Trump White House sources say, the president was telling advisers that carrying out capital punishment would insulate him from criticism that he was soft on crime. And in his attorney general, Bill Barr, a longtime death-penalty advocate, he had the perfect accomplice.

Cool, so Trump killed 13 people for the sake of his re-election.

The executions, carried out in the name of law and order, took place at a time of peak lawlessness within the White House. While his administration killed prisoners at an unprecedented clip, Trump spent his final months attempting to overturn the 2020 election, culminating in the Jan. 6 ransacking of the U.S. Capitol. 

The ransacking that got five more people killed.

The killing spree ended with Trump’s first term, as President Biden suspended capital punishment on the federal level, but it may only have been a pause. The former president is running again — and opened his 2024 campaign with a speech that promised more executions if he wins: “We’re going to be asking [for] everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts,” Trump said in his November campaign announcement. “Because it is the only way.”

Of course, he has a record.

Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for the death penalty dates back decades. His first real foray into politics was a public call for executions after five teenagers of color were arrested in the brutal rape and assault of a female jogger in New York City in 1989. “Bring back the death penalty. Bring back our police,” screamed a full-page ad Trump had placed in the New York Daily News at the time. The Central Park Five, as the young men came to be known, were later exonerated by DNA evidence, after they had served years in prison. But Trump never apologized for the ad.

Or anything else. He’s not an apologize kind of guy. He has none of the qualities necessary for a person who apologizes: no compassion, no conscience, no generosity, no basic decency, no empathy, no ability to look at himself from the outside and perceive flaws. He doesn’t even have receptors for that most basic feeling of happiness or relief in making someone else feel better.