Trump tells a Rose Garden lunch for first responders he wants the death penalty for anyone who kills a firefighter

President Donald Trump used a Rose Garden lunch for the people who run toward fires and gunfire to extend one of his oldest law and order demands.

Speaking on Thursday to a gathering of firefighters and law enforcement officers, Trump said he had directed Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Justice Department to pursue the death penalty for anyone convicted of killing a firefighter, specifically anyone who murders a firefighter going up a ladder. Firefighters, he said, get shot at in rough neighbourhoods while climbing toward the fire, and he predicted the punishment would stop such shootings quickly. As president, he said, he will always stand with those who stand on the front lines.

The demand builds on ground he has held for years. Trump has repeatedly called for the death penalty for anyone who kills a police officer, and on his first day back in the White House in January 2025 he signed an executive order directing the attorney general to pursue federal jurisdiction and seek capital punishment, where legally permissible, in cases involving the murder of law enforcement officers. Thursday's remarks put firefighters inside the same policy by name, which they had not been before.

Steve Hirsch, chairman of the National Volunteer Fire Council, which represents about 750,000 firefighters, presented the president with a fire helmet and asked God to wrap a protective arm around him. Trump, who was shot in the ear in the 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, joked that he could have used the helmet there.

The remarks landed in a week when capital punishment was already at the centre of national attention, between the attempted execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee and the president's decision, also on Thursday, to cancel the plan to livestream the December firing squad execution of the Fort Hood shooter. A direction to seek the death penalty is an instruction to prosecutors within the law as it stands. Whether a given killing of a firefighter can be charged as a federal capital case still depends on the facts of that case and on federal jurisdiction, which Congress, not the president, defines.