National Review Online
Wednesday, July 17, 2024
The U.S. Secret Service failed. That Donald Trump is
alive today is only a result of sheer luck — a bullet that missed by less than
an inch, a head tilt at the right split second. But make no mistake, the fact
that an aspiring assassin was able to get to an elevated position within an
easy shot of the former president and leading candidate to be the next
president is a stunning failure of an agency whose primary mission is to
protect the president.
Let us also not forget that in addition to a bullet
grazing Trump’s ear, there were multiple casualties — Corey Comperatore, a
firefighter who died heroically shielding his family from bullets, and two
others who were seriously injured.
In the aftermath of the shocking event on Saturday, many questions have been raised about the response. Why
didn’t the counter-sniper team take out the shooter before he fired a shot? Why
didn’t they respond more quickly as spectators frantically drew police
attention to the suspicious man crawling on the roof? Why did they let Trump
continue speaking once this threat was identified? Why didn’t they whisk him
away sooner in case there was a second assassin?
These are all fair questions, but each one of them can be
answered by some variation of explaining a breakdown in communication or
imperfect responses in real time. The one question that was most perplexing
from the day of the shooting was, how did the Secret Service allow a would-be
assassin to get so close to the president, just 150 yards away — a shot that
wouldn’t be too difficult for anybody with basic training in looking through
the scope of a rifle and pulling a trigger? Why wasn’t somebody posted on the
roof when that could have been arranged in advance?
At first, some of the explanations that came out were
that the Secret Service had outsourced to local police the responsibility for
securing the locations outside the gates where the crowd was let in — in other
words, the area outside the heavily secured area. And there were questions
about whether a lack of resources was the issue and the team was spread too
thin to post somebody on the roof.
But on Monday, it emerged that in fact multiple
law-enforcement officers were inside the building at the time of the shooting.
Meaning there wasn’t a shortage of personnel — they just were not posted on the
roof.
Then, in an interview
with ABC News that aired Tuesday, Kimberly Cheatle, the director
of the Secret Service, made an extraordinary revelation.
“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its
highest point,” Cheatle said. “And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that
would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped
roof. And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from
inside.”
This makes no sense, on multiple levels. For one, the
would-be assassin (a slight-looking 20-year-old with no evidence of any sort of
combat training) managed to scale the building and get off multiple shots at
Trump. Secondarily, the counter-sniper who ultimately took out the shooter was
posted on a sloped roof.
There is simply no excuse for a stunning failure that,
but for a stroke of luck or act of God, would have ended up with Trump’s death,
and all of the political and social turmoil that would have come with it.
Despite this incredible dereliction of duty, Homeland
Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas declared, “I have 100 percent confidence”
in Cheatle.
As for Cheatle herself, she tried to act accountable in
her ABC interview, claiming, “The buck stops with me.” But if those words are
to have any meaning, there is only one move that she can make. Kimberly Cheatle
must resign immediately and be replaced by somebody who can do the job
competently.
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