By Rich Lowry
Monday, July 22, 2024
The best thing any group of Republican senators has
done in recent memory is chase Kimberly Cheatle down the hallway at the RNC
last week.
The head of the Secret
Service is an appropriate target for outrage.
She should have been gone the night of the attempted
Trump assassination, and now is a symbol of the incompetence and lack of
responsibility that has destroyed trust in our institutions.
Cheatle should have felt honor-bound to resign, and,
failing that, President Biden should have felt honor-bound to fire her.
When she says that she’s taking responsibility, she means
it in the contemporary Washington sense — i.e., saying it insulates you from
doing it.
If Trump had been killed, she presumably would have been
out instantly — at least, one hopes. That he narrowly lived shouldn’t benefit
her. She doesn’t get credit for Trump’s providential turn of his head and the
centimeter that saved the nation from catastrophe and the Secret Service from a
calamitous failure that would have brought eternal discredit to everyone
involved.
What is it that makes Cheatle so indispensable? Is she
some unique talent? Is she pursuing some transformational agenda, besides the DEI stuff? Is she going to clean up what’s wrong with
the agency? If so, what exactly was she doing prior to this point? Obviously,
someone — anyone — not associated with a grotesque security failure in Butler,
Pa., and not hated and distrusted now by half the country would be better
suited to do it.
The Secret Service has an exalted place in the public
imagination, thanks to numerous movies and TV shows and the very admirable
professional duty of agents to risk their lives shielding a protectee.
That it, too, turns out to be a mediocre bureaucracy
that, on top of its other failures and scandals, can’t even
competently perform its one, most important task of protecting a former
president and current presidential front-runner is profoundly depressing.
Now we are in the inevitable cycle of excuse-making,
evasion, and contradictory information.
As the Wall Street Journal notes in a report, “the agency over the weekend
acknowledged it had rebuffed requests for additional resources for Trump’s
security detail in the two years leading up to the assassination attempt. That
was a reversal from an earlier statement last week in which an agency spokesman
denied that such requests had been turned down.”
The report continues, “Cheatle raised eyebrows when she
said nothing publicly in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Then, in her
first remarks two days later during an interview with ABC News, she offered
mixed messages, saying she was ultimately responsible for the former
president’s security but identifying local law enforcement as responsible for
the building where the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, got a clear shot at
Trump.”
One follow-on effect of the Secret Service’s failure in
Butler, the full magnitude of which we are still learning, is that it has
stoked conspiracy theories about the shooting. Think of it this way, though: If
the choice is between believing the people entrusted with Trump’s security in
Butler were criminal masterminds or morons, which would you take?
There is no evidence of the former, but abundant
evidence, growing by the day, for the latter.
Apparently in her congressional testimony today, Cheatle
will say, “Thinking about what we should have done differently is never far
from my thoughts.”
As if that is remotely enough.
It would be a sign of institutional self-respect if the
person in charge realized that having exacting standards means that she, too,
should be held to them; that truly taking responsibility requires acting like
it, not just talking about it; and that accountability at the highest level
would send an important message within the Secret Service and without it.
Instead, the person in charge is Kimberly Cheatle. She
is, sad to say, truly a leader for our time.
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