Fox News aired a street-interview segment on Friday that, on its face, showed everyday Americans praising President Donald Trump for reversing a deeply unpopular decision by his own administration. But in the final moments before the piece faded out, the network let one bluntly profane assessment of the president slip onto the air.

Fox framed the story in its Fox News Digital report: “Americans interviewed by Fox News Digital were overwhelmingly pleased with President Donald Trump's decision to call off livestreaming the Fort Hood shooter’s planned firing squad execution after the Pentagon had announced it would be livestreamed for public viewing.”

What that upbeat framing leaves out is that Trump initially backed the plan “absolutely” — a plan Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had announced with considerable enthusiasm. The president’s position shifted only after he learned that the shooter, Nidal Hasan, was paralyzed from the waist down, and after polling showed that 8 in 10 Americans opposed a public execution. And while Fox described the people it spoke with as “pleased,” their words and demeanor came closer to “relieved.”

“I think it was trying to save his image politically,” one said. Another observed, “The only other countries that really do that are like North Korea. We don't want to be North Korea.” That same speaker called the cancellation “a good move,” adding, “A public execution? That's unheard of. The last time that was in America was nearly a hundred years ago or more.” That timeline holds: the last execution conducted before a public crowd in the United States took place in 1937, and no state today permits cameras inside its execution chamber.

“I'm really glad that he called it off because I feel like it's not really a deterrent. It's more like a shock effect. I don't think we really need that in this country right now,” said another interviewee.

Hasan was serving as an Army psychiatrist at the time of the shooting, in which he killed 13 people and injured 32 others at a military base in Texas. Now 56 years old, he uses a wheelchair after being left partially paralyzed when he was shot by police during his arrest. The November 2009 attack at Fort Hood remains the deadliest shooting on a U.S. military installation, and a court-martial convicted Hasan and sentenced him to death in 2013; he has since been held at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, while his case has moved through the appeals process. Firing squad is among the rarest execution methods in the modern American system, where lethal injection has long been the default. After Hegseth announced that the firing squad execution would be broadcast live, Trump ultimately overturned the move, acknowledging that most Americans did not want to see it. With the broadcast scrapped, the markers to watch are whether the Pentagon sets a new date for the firing squad execution and how Hasan’s long-running appeals proceed.

“We don't need to see anything like that. That's inhumane,” one Fox interviewee said. “I think it was just so clearly an unpopular thing to do that he realized it would probably do more harm to his public image than good,” another noted.

A third speaker agreed — and offered an unvarnished opinion of the president. “He doesn't want to look bad. He doesn't want to look like a bad person,” she said. “But at the end of the day, we all know who he really is: a piece of s—.”

The segment aired as Trump’s approval numbers sink to record lows in his ally’s own polling. According to a poll released earlier this week, “Trump’s overall job approval is 36 percent, his lowest ever in a Fox News survey for either term.” Other polls have shown his support as low as 32 percent. As Fox explains, “The decline is mainly driven by decreases among voters under age 45, those with annual household income below $50,000, non-White voters, and those without a college degree.”