President Donald Trump has publicly celebrated the idea of having the Fort Hood shooter executed by firing squad, but that vision appears to be falling apart amid growing scandals, according to a retired general and a former prosecutor who examined the plan this week.

Retired Gen. Mark Hertling and former prosecutor Margaret Donovan joined Ben Parker on The Bulwark's "Command Post" podcast Wednesday, where they discussed reporting this week that Trump is now wavering on putting Nidal Malik Hasan to death by firing squad. Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist at the time of the attack, opened fire on fellow service members at Fort Hood on November 5, 2009, killing 13 people and wounding more than 30 others. A court-martial convicted him and sentenced him to death in August 2013, and he has been held at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth ever since while his case moved through the military appeals process.

Trump appears to be imagining a movie-style scene in which a defiant strongman stands before the squad and is taken down by the U.S. military. Both Donovan and Hertling noted that Hasan is a 60-year-old man who is paralyzed from the chest down. He cannot walk or stand, and if the government intends to shoot him, he would likely be sitting in a wheelchair.

According to CBS News, Trump now understands that the optics do not appear to be what he wants.

Hertling pointed out that the other risk is that Hasan is trying to paint himself "as a martyr for his religion. Killing the infidels. So, this would only contribute to that view of him as a martyr. You know, the president suggested he might change his mind because he found out the guy was in a wheelchair? That also gives an indicator of a lack of the entire case by our leaders that are making this decision."

Both he and Donovan recalled the specific Army regulation (190-55) that outlines how executions are carried out for military prisoners. Donovan explained that there is also a logistical nightmare in securing a certified place to carry out an execution, since Fort Hood is not a location where that is done. Military prisoners are typically executed at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Executions under military law are exceedingly rare: no service member has been put to death since 1961, when Army Private John Bennett was hanged at Fort Leavenworth. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a court-martial death sentence is also automatically appealed and cannot be carried out without the president's approval, a process that has kept Hasan's sentence unresolved for more than a decade.

That left her with a question: whether the cost and logistics of doing everything properly were worth something that is nothing more than theater for Trump.

"If it's all for theater, is that fear going to be appropriated by somebody else? Because I'm pretty sure it is. That's kind of the whole thing about how particularly soon extremists recruit each other," Donovan said.

Several Army units are stationed at Fort Hood, and Hertling asked whether service members would be required to watch the execution as part of the theater. Would those who carry out the shooting be trained to do so, given that no members of the military have done this? Firing squads are rare across the United States as well, with only a handful of states authorizing the method.

"But most importantly, how much of a moral injury is this going to contribute to?" the retired general asked. "Because if you ask one of the last firing squad executions in the military was Private Eddie Slovik in 1945. And in that execution they had a rack of rifles with 12 rifles on it, and it depends on the regulation on it, but one in four of those have blank rounds in it. So, a soldier who's firing at the individual could claim deniability of being actually being the one who murdered him."

His second point, he said, is that if these military members "intend to use M-16 or M-4 rifles with a 556 caliber bullet that travels at 29 feet per second when it exits the chamber it is going to rip that body up. And to have that kind of gore and horrific action on a live stream is just contrary to everything I think we aspire to be as a nation."

Donovan agreed, adding that it is an extremely violent way to die and yet another reason not to make Hasan a celebrity.

She then turned to Trump's obsession with turning everything into World War II and the ethos and heroism that surround it. Trump has recently decided to build expensive ships for his "Golden Fleet" that do not follow the latest designs the military has spent decades perfecting; instead, he wants them to look like World War II ships. The firing squad idea, likewise, is something Trump said was once done in World War II.

That fantasy, Donovan said, essentially negates everything about the realities of that war, in which the top leaders came together afterward to outline a set of rules, treaties, agreements and laws designed to prevent another war like it.

Parker chimed in, saying that for all of Trump's World War II obsessions, he is ignoring a key piece of that war: the draft, which required participation from all American men, not just 1 percent of them.