The Pentagon’s plan to livestream a firing-squad execution has been canceled, which is the sort of sentence that makes “government successfully avoids inventing a new genre of horror” feel like a measurable achievement.

President Trump said Thursday that the December 3 execution of Nidal Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, will still proceed but will not be broadcast. Families of the victims may attend. The reversal followed objections from survivors, lawmakers, religious leaders and roughly eight in ten Americans surveyed by The Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsos.

The Pentagon says Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are completely aligned. Naturally. Nothing demonstrates perfect alignment like one person publicly canceling the other person’s signature idea.

This was never transparency. Transparency is releasing records, legal reasoning and oversight findings. Broadcasting state violence is spectacle with a government seal in the corner.

The administration deserves no medal for discovering that an execution should not have a watch party. But credit where it is due: somebody finally found a screen the federal government wanted to turn off.