She should have been gone weeks ago.
She should have been gone weeks ago.
T he 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.