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.