Is Joe Biden Capable of Firing Anybody?

The first presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump will be remembered for years, if not decades — but ironically enough not for anything anyone said during it. The phrase “whrzza? wuh?” probably best captures Biden’s overall performance; there were no memorable one-liners or destined-to-be-historic quotes. (On second thought, the sentence “We finally beat Medicare!” deserves to be carved on Biden’s political tombstone.) I do remember Trump landing one clean hit, however: the moment he asked why in God’s name Biden was terminally incapable of firing anyone, despite reeling from one mortifying scandal — the border crisis, the drug crisis, self-inflicted runaway inflation, the catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal, the mysterious disappearance of the defense secretary — to the next. “He doesn’t fire people. He never fired people. I’ve never seen him fire anybody. I did fire a lot.”

Set aside the fact that — despite his Apprentice reputation — Trump was famously wimpy about firing anyone face-to-face during his administration. (You would get knifed, sure, but always in the back, by a third party, and with a bucket of slop upended over your stiffened corpse as the coroner wheeled you to the morgue.) It was a good point when Trump said it — I remember noting as much in the moment — and it has become acutely, urgently relevant since then: Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle must be fired immediately, and her termination must be an act of public shaming and public transparency. No gold watch, no kind thanks for years of service — not this time. (An apology to the nation would be a start, though.)

For it is becoming increasingly clear that the United States Secret Service, through multiple astonishing, overlapping failures and serial acts of negligence, nearly got Donald Trump murdered on stage last week. The agency’s failure is total: A man is dead, two others were injured, the president was injured, and the social fabric of the country came within one lucky head-tilt of being rent asunder. And nobody is being held accountable for it. President Biden cannot bring himself to fire the Secret Service director even amid the escalating revelations of professional incompetence surrounding the worst and most fatal presidential security failure since the days of Dealey Plaza and the Ambassador Hotel. No, Biden in fact retains complete confidence in her, just as he retains complete confidence in everyone else who has ever worked for this administration — with the exception perhaps of Sam Brinton.

Outrageous new facts emerge every day. We now discover that the shooter had been identified as a suspicious-acting “person of interest” by law enforcement well over an hour before Donald Trump took the stage. We now discover that he had been spotted mounting the roof he shot from and identified as a “threat” a full ten minutes in advance of Trump’s taking the stage. During those ten minutes, an entire group of Secret Service and local law-enforcement agents were placed underneath the very building the shooter used. In the most infuriating statement of all, Cheatle blamed the potential hazardousness of that building’s gently “sloped roof” for the fact that Secret Service and law enforcement were clustered underneath it while not a single man was placed atop it. (The sloped roof clearly did not trouble the shooter.) Cheatle says she is terribly sorry for all this dreadful, fatal incompetence, and that of course the situation is “unacceptable,” which is an accurate enough characterization in its own way: She clearly believes that taking responsibility for any of this is unacceptable, and has thus stubbornly refused to resign. The Biden administration is backing her up.

It’s important to avoid conspiracy-theorizing right now, not just because it’s wrong but because it will be used by Democrats and the Biden administration as a distraction to trivialize or avoid the real problem. The mountain of accumulated failures that led to the shooting attests directly to a Secret Service whose internal standards have collapsed. And it is nothing new — as bad as Cheatle is, with her reported focus on DEI and relaxation of job standards, the present situation is merely the culmination of a long history of scandalous behavior that tends to get swept under the rug by lawmakers. Dominic Pino addressed this brilliantly on the day of the shooting, noting the shockingly long list of failures overseen by the Secret Service dating all the way back to the early years of the Obama administration. Since that time, White House gala-crashers, prostitution and pedophilia scandals, leaks against congressional enemies, and a procession of fence-jumpers (one of whom got all the way inside the White House) have all disgraced the reputation of the agency.

So if there’s any conspiracy at play, it’s the most drearily obvious one: a conspiracy to hide just how dangerously incompetent the Secret Service has become at executing its most mission-critical task. (When you allow a shooter to set up shop directly over your head for ten whole minutes, you are officially out of excuses.)

Cheatle’s argument as she fights to retain her job is apparently that it would be — get this — too dangerous to fire her. According to her spokesman, “continuity of operations is paramount during a critical incident” and therefore she “has no intentions to step down.” Yes, apparently because the Secret Service director has proven herself to be staggeringly, fatally incompetent when it comes to protecting Trump, it is now more important than ever that she be allowed to continue in the job. Don’t change horses in midstream — why, if we did that we would run the risk of chaos at the Secret Service in the late stages of a presidential-election campaign. What we have right now is apparently a model of regular order.

The assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., was possible only because of a massively cascading series of systemic law-enforcement failures from the top to the bottom — federal all the way down to local. Everyone has a deeply humiliating lesson to learn here. But accountability must begin at the top, with the men and women directly responsible for protecting the lives of the president and other high-profile political candidates. If we simply exhale in relief and whistle past the graveyard, as the Biden administration would have us do, then mark my words: We will be returning to that graveyard later to cry over a fresh tombstone — perhaps sooner than you think.