By: John C. Wohlstetter, Senior Fellow
July 13 joins a list of American dates that will be remembered without reference to the year—think December 7, November 22, September 11.
After a chorus of “shooting candidates has no place in our society” incantations that weekend, once the GOP Convention got started it was, per baseball Hall of Fame Yogi Berra’s famous malapropism, “deja vu all over again”: open season on Trump, Republicans, etc.
Worse, Harris, had in 2018 joked about killing Trump during an appearance with talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres. Asked with whom she’d rather share an elevator with, Trump, Mike Pence, or Jefferson Sessions, she asked, “Does one of us have to come out alive?” DeGeneres laughed as did the audience and Kamala cut loose with her trademark cackle.
At age 77, I can recall that after JFK’s assassination jokes about such matters became strictly verboten—anyone did uttered such jokes in public risked arrest for posing a threat to the president. Short of that, being fired, and socially ostracized, was virtually certain. Call it cancel culture before cancel culture became cool—at least, for critics of Republicans.
In all, Democrats today have much to answer for. Days before the near-miss on the former president’s life, Biden said: “It’s time to put Trump in the bullseye.” This April, House Judiciary chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) introduced legislation, the DISGRACED Former Protectees Act (CAPS in original). The DFPA would
reform the U.S. Secret Service’s protective mission by automatically terminating Secret Service protection for those who have been sentenced to prison following conviction for a Federal or State felony—clarifying that prison authorities would be responsible for the protection of all inmates regardless of previous Secret Service protection.
Thompson added that the bill was intended to see that former protectees convicted of a felony do not get special treatment while in prison.
Former attorney-general William Barr (whose second stint was as one of Trump’s attorneys-general) said: ” The Democrats have to stop their grossly irresponsible talk about Trump being an existential threat to democracy. He is not.”
A former assistant FBI director called (5:44) the July 13 event “a security breakdown from start to finish”; he cited the failure of the Service to properly protect the president, and a delay in getting the former president off the stage and into the car—in stark contrast, he noted, to the instant rapid response of the Service made in hustling former president Ronald Reagan into the presidential limousine and away from the scene of the shooting. Finally, he said: “Anyone who demonizes someone in the matter the he has been demonized has basically put a bullseye on him.”
An IDF special services veteran said (5:39) that a split-second head turn—a shot from an AR-15 rifle travels 3,300 feet per second—high-likely saved the former president’s life. He called a 150-yard shot “a putt.”
Former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino stated, of the Secret Service’s serial inactions on requests from Republicans for added security: I want to repeat, and can absolutely confirm, the USSS Director Kim Cheatle has repeatedly turned down requests for a larger security footprint around President Trump. Despite knowing the threat level is catastrophic.
In 2015 the House of Representatives issued a scathing report, United States Secret Service: An Agency in Crisis. It focused on four incidents: (1) a gunman who fired several shots at the White House on Nov. 11, 2011; several agents consorting with females of ill-repute in Cartagena, Colombia in April 2012; (3) an armed security guard with a violent arrest record who rode in the elevator with then-president Obama and later breached the security perimeter on Sep. 16, 2014; (4) two drunk Secret Service agents—one who was part of the president’s protective detail—who interfered with an on-site investigation of a March 4, 2015 bomb threat. The Committee findings cited budget shortfalls, high attrition rate, poor morale, lack of confidence in Service leadership, and calls for bringing outside leaders to lead a full-scale effort. A core comprehensive compilation was posted at National Review.
Nothing better encapsulates this current failure of the Secret Service than Director Cheatle’s “sloping roof’ alibi: that a sloping roof—in fact, an upward gradient of, NOT making this up, three percent, raised “safety concerns as to the security forces; never mind that the gradient that counter-snipers faced on their roof top perch was greater than three percent.
Bottom Line. The Secret Service is being run into the ground. Democrats have seen their main theme—hostility to Trump as Evil Incarnate, trashed by a tectonic event—NOT a Black Swan—as it was entirely foreseeable. The image of Trump, nearly martyred, fist raised in the air with an American flag in hand, will be the iconic image of the 2024 campaign and will go down in history, joining the iconic 1945 photo of GIs failing the flag atop Mount Suribachi during the sanguinary battle for control of the island of Iwo Jima.
John C. Wohlstetter, the author of Presidential Succession: Constitution, Congress, and National Security (Gold Institute Press, 2024), is a senior fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington, DC-based national security, and foreign policy think-tank.
