Public approval of the Secret Service has dropped precipitously to its lowest point in a decade after the federal agency’s security failures during the first assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump in July, a new Gallup poll found.
Just 32 percent of Americans rate the Secret Service’s job performance as excellent or good while 36 percent rate it as poor, according to Monday’s survey. This drop is notable, considering last year 55 percent of respondents said the agency had done an excellent or good job and only 13 percent marked it as having done a poor job.
In 2014, when Gallup started measuring Americans’ views of the Secret Service, the Secret Service’s approval rating sat at 43 percent. The agency oversaw a series of security lapses that year, including one in which a knife-wielding intruder ran into the White House during Barack Obama’s tenure. The Secret Service’s approval rating had not dropped below 50 percent since then until this year.
The Secret Service has faced increased scrutiny over its failures to protect the former president at his July 13 rally in Butler, Pa., where gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, was able to fire off several rounds in Trump’s direction, one of which grazed his right ear. The attack led to bipartisan criticism of the agency, which has only grown louder since the latest assassination attempt on Trump last weekend.
On September 15, a Secret Service agent spotted and opened fire on would-be assassin Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, hiding in a bush with a rifle at Trump’s Florida golf club. The exchange caused Routh to flee the scene in his vehicle. He was detained by police and taken into custody shortly thereafter.
Secret Service acting director Ronald Rowe later admitted that agents did not search the golf course’s perimeter before Trump started golfing, an activity that wasn’t in the GOP nominee’s official plans for the day.
“The president wasn’t even really supposed to go there. It was not on his official schedule,” Rowe said last week. “And so we put together a security plan, and that security plan worked.”
Gallup conducted the poll from September 3-15, meaning most respondents did not take the second assassination attempt into account when answering. The pollster said it was unclear whether the latest episode would have drastically changed the Secret Service’s rating, though it wouldn’t have gotten any better.
On Friday, the Secret Service’s internal review found several blatant “communications deficiencies” in preparing for Trump’s rally in western Pennsylvania this summer. Among the issues raised included miscommunication between local and federal law enforcement, a breach of security protocols, the rally’s venue posing a security challenge, and numerous other problems.
Since the July attack, Republicans have rated the Secret Service more harshly than Democrats. Only 20 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents view the government body more positively, slipping from 46 percent in 2023. Whereas 47 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents answered positively, down from 65 percent last year.
The Republican rating is its lowest to date, and Democrats are slightly above their lowest rating in 2014.
In addition to the Secret Service, other federal agencies have received poor marks across the board. Of the 15 total agencies that Gallup assessed, the Department of Justice (29 percent) and Department of Veterans Affairs (28 percent) are the only bodies rated lower than the president’s security detail. The highest-rated body was the U.S. Postal Service, which 59 percent of Americans said is excellent or good.