Preliminarily, let me say what I wrote yesterday: Trump’s near miss seems to have an element of Divine Providence to it, reminiscent of how George Washington invariably emerged from the heat of battle unscathed. Just sayin’. Now, to the topic at hand, which is the Secret Service’s performance before, during, and after the assassination attempt. It wasn’t good.

Ironically, just yesterday, I finished reading Lee Child’s Without Fail, which was published in 2008. In it, Jack Reacher works with the female head of the Vice President’s Secret Service detail to help foil an assassination attempt. Unlike most Reacher novels, this one had no fistfights. Instead, it focuses tightly on what the Secret Service does to protect politicians.

I don’t know what kind of research Child did, but the point he makes repeatedly — and it’s an obvious and intuitive one — is that the Secret Service must control the high ground. Every rooftop or high floor within range of a politician is a potential platform for an assassin.

In Butler, Pennsylvania, however, not only did the Secret Service seemingly make no effort to control a rooftop within relatively easy shooting distance of a former president and current presidential candidate, but Secret Service agents also seemed disinterested in repeated warnings that a man with a gun had crawled on top of a building that gave him a clear shot at President Trump. This video shows the first eyewitness we heard from, but reports are that several other people saw the same thing and had the same response from Trump’s security detail — that is, no response:

The fact is that the shooter was on high ground (a rooftop) that was so close to President Trump that the Secret Service should have had it completely locked down before the event began. It was a shot that required no special skill because it was so close — and it’s utterly inexplicable how this could have happened:

There’s also evidence that government snipers had the shooter in their sights…but did nothing. I have no idea if that correctly interprets the footage below and, if it does, if there’s a good explanation for the delay in action. So, as of this moment, I am not criticizing the sniper; I’m just observing a potential fact:


UPDATE: There are rumors that the counter snipers wanted to act but were denied leave to do so:

What might explain the Secret Service’s poor performance in securing the location is that insiders are claiming that the Biden administration refused to beef up Trump’s security detail despite warnings that Trump was at high risk of an assassination attempt:

Anthony Guglielmi, the Secret Service’s Chief of Communications, has strongly disputed this claim:

Of course, his statement could mean that Trump went from a completely inadequate Secret Service detail to a slightly more adequate detail. It doesn’t mean that the Biden administration actually provided the protection Trump needed. After all, on June 28, Biden identified Donald Trump as “a genuine threat to this nation.”

Donald Trump is a genuine threat to this nation.

In other words, Trump = Hitler. If you were a member of a government trying to keep an alleged Hitler from taking over, would you be rigorous about providing the best protection possible? I didn’t think so.

I mean, heck, it doesn’t even seem as if Trump’s Secret Service detail had the resources to have a drone flying over the venue to make sure only government snipers occupied rooftops!

So, the before was inadequate, whether deliberately or through incompetence.

The during was inadequate, too. To their credit, the agents did immediately surround Trump but their performance afterward was chaotic:

And then there was the after when the Secret Service was getting Trump out of the venue. These videos tell a story:

There’s an old saying about inept institutions that “a fish rots from the head.” The boss sets the policy, and, in this case, the boss is Kimberly A. Cheatle. Cheatle’s openly-stated priority wasn’t to have the best trained, most tightly functioning A1 team imaginable. Instead, it was to have 30% of all Secret Service agents be women by the year 2030 and generally to bow before the Democrat god of “diversity”:

Cheatle’s DEI goal turned into DIE for one tragically unlucky attendee and almost for Donald Trump. What’s even worse is learning that, before yesterday’s assassination attempt, 39 Secret Service agents were so worried about how inadequately these new hires were performing that they signed a petition demanding an investigation into the problem. That demand followed on the heels of one of the female agents on Kamala’s detail having a very public breakdown:

Those things happen when underqualified people confront their own limitations.

But there’s more. Cheatle is also political in a way that suggests she’s not only all-in on the disaster of non-merit-based DEI, but also that she will do anything to protect the Biden administration:

I am not accusing anyone in the Secret Service (or in the Biden government as a whole) of deliberately trying to get Donald Trump killed. However, I am saying that the Secret Service’s performance was completely inadequate in many instances, that it appears that the obsession with DEI was a factor in this inadequacy, and that it’s possible that an underlying animus toward Donald Trump created an environment in which Trump’s protection was dysfunctional, both in terms of staffing and attitude.

Source: Andrea Widburg, americanthinker.com/blog/2024/07/it_s_time_to_talk_about_the_secret_service_problem_we_saw_yesterday.html