Donald Trump on Christa Pike: “It Shouldn’t Be Very Difficult” After Failed Tennessee Execution

President Donald Trump has finally spoken about the failed execution of Christa Pike, and he did not hold back. Asked this week whether the case should push him to change anything about capital punishment, Trump called it an “interesting situation” and then offered a blunt five word judgment on what went wrong. “It shouldn’t be very difficult,” he said.

Pike, who is 50, was supposed to die by lethal injection on Wednesday at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. She had been on Tennessee’s death row for three decades after a jury convicted her of murdering 19 year old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville in 1995. If the sentence had been carried out, she would have been the first woman executed by the state in more than 200 years.

That is not what happened. Pike was strapped to a gurney and given two doses of pentobarbital. Neither one killed her. A witness said that around 7:34 p.m. she told the room, “My arm feels like it is about to burst open,” then asked, “Does this happen like that?” People inside the chamber said she was kicking her feet while she was restrained and the drugs were going in.

After the attempt failed, she was taken to a hospital outside the prison. A doctor working with her legal team has said the ordeal could leave her with serious lasting harm, and that she is very likely brain damaged. What the state does next, if she survives, is still unknown. The failure has already drawn heavy criticism.

Trump made his remarks after landing in Texas, telling reporters they would have to ask Tennessee whether officials plan to try again. He turned to Rep. Ronny Jackson, his former White House physician, and asked how something like that could even happen. Jackson said he did not know, and that it should be easy to do. Trump agreed.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee had already refused Pike’s request for clemency in the days before the scheduled execution. After she survived, he called the situation a tragedy, ordered an outside review, and paused the remaining executions on the state’s calendar for the rest of the year.