Shocking Trump-Rally Failure Highlights Secret Service Recruiting Issues, Diversity Distractions

The failure to prevent Saturday’s attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally is likely due to either faulty planning by the Secret Service, the inability of local law enforcement to secure the building where the shooter was perched, or a breakdown in communication between federal agents and their local counterparts, security experts and former Secret Service agents told National Review.

But the security failure, which resulted in Trump’s being shot in the ear and one rally-goer’s death, also highlights the ramifications of the ongoing law-enforcement hiring and retention crisis, to which the Secret Service has not been immune. While Saturday’s tragedy is certainly the most dramatic Secret Service failure in recent history, the agency has had a slew of embarrassing episodes over the past 15 years, including several incidents in which unknown individuals, some of them armed, gained access to White House grounds or were otherwise able to get within striking distance of the president.

Three security professionals and former Secret Service agents who spoke to National Review said that like local law-enforcement agencies around the country, the Secret Service has lowered hiring standards to fill positions and diversify its ranks.

“They can’t keep agents,” said Ron T. Williams, a former Secret Service agent who is now the head of Talon Companies, a trio of Los Angeles–based private security firms. “They’re replenishing the force with agents that would have never made it in my day.”

The Secret Service likely was also dealing with resource constraints on Saturday because of a confluence of events that weekend — in addition to Trump’s Pennsylvania rally, Vice President Kamala Harris was campaigning in Philadelphia and First Lady Jill Biden was stumping for her husband nearby in Pittsburgh. The manpower-intense NATO summit had also just wrapped up in Washington, D.C., while the Republican National Convention kicked off on Monday in Milwaukee.

“You see resources start to get stretched thin, whether its police resources or Secret Service resources, because there is just a lot to do and you don’t necessarily have an infinite level of people do to it with,” said Jason Russell, a former Secret Service agent who is president of Secure Environment Consultants, a Michigan-based security firm.

Russell agreed that the Secret Service has had to change its hiring criteria to fill its ranks. When he started with the Secret Service in 2002, he already had a master’s degree and six years of experience working as a police officer.

“Now I think they’re taking kids almost fresh out of college in some cases, because it’s a tough time to recruit people to go into law enforcement,” he said, noting that working for the Secret Service is “a tough job, and there’s a lot of travel. It can be difficult on your life.”

Joseph Sordi, a former New York Police Department intelligence officer who is now president of the New York–based Strategic Security Corp., was blunt: Saturday’s security failure was “a direct outcome of a failure to recruit, lowering training standards, retaining experienced officers,” he said.

As a result of the anti-police sentiment and increased oversight that coincided with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement over the past decade, many veteran local and federal law-enforcement officers exited the field, in part to preserve their retirements, Sordi said.

“The constant thing I hear from these individuals is, it’s just not the same job anymore,” including more scrutiny and less freedom to “pursue and hunt down threats,” he said.

Highly skilled cyber-crimes investigators are also getting plucked away by private companies, which can often pay more, Williams said.

He also bemoaned what he called “DEI bullsh**” and “woke bullsh**” that has led to lower standards to recruit and hire more minority agents and women.

The Secret Service’s website makes clear that a “commitment to diversity” and maintaining an “inclusive” work environment are agency priorities. Kimberly Cheatle, the Secret Service director who was appointed by President Joe Biden in 2022, has been clear about her intention to have women make up 30 percent of recruits by 2030.

“I’m very conscious as I sit in this chair now, of making sure that we need to attract diverse candidates and ensure that we are developing and giving opportunities to everybody in our workforce, and particularly women,” Cheatle told CBS News last year.

Williams said the Secret Service should be hiring and promoting candidates based on their qualifications and their ability to do the job, not on their race or gender.

As for the breakdown that led to Saturday’s shooting, “the ball got dropped,” Williams said. But he urged the public to “wait until the facts come out before you start slinging arrows.”

He said events like Saturday’s Trump rally have three perimeters — an inner perimeter, which would include the agents directly around the person being protected, a middle perimeter, which is the rest of the area within the security fences, and an outer perimeter. Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old man who shot at Trump on Saturday, was on top of a building in the outside perimeter, about 130 yards from Trump’s podium.

“The outer perimeter is always manned by local law enforcement,” Williams said.

The responsibility for planning security at the event would have likely fallen to an advance agent with the Secret Service, who would coordinate with local law enforcement.

Identifying a building nearby with a direct line to a presidential candidate is “Protection 101,” Williams said. If the advance agent failed to note that and to coordinate with local law-enforcement leaders, he or she “deserves to be fired,” he said.

But it appears that local law enforcement was at the building.

In an interview on Monday with ABC, Cheatle said local authorities had been tasked with securing the building that the shooter climbed on top of and shot from.

“In this particular instance, we did share support for that particular site and that the Secret Service was responsible for the inner perimeter,” she said. “And then we sought assistance from our local counterparts for the outer perimeter. There was local police in that building — there was local police in the area that were responsible for the outer perimeter of the building.”

Cheatle added that there were safety concerns about having an agent stationed on the roof, given that it may not have provided secure footing.

“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. 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,” she said. Photos of law-enforcement personnel gathered around the shooter’s body after the attack appear to show them standing on the roof with ease.

The Secret Service director told ABC that “the buck stops with me.” The security professionals and former agents who spoke with National Review agreed that, ultimately, Trump’s security rested with the Secret Service. But at some point they have to rely on their local partners to do their job.

Reports and videos indicate that witnesses were alerting local officers to Crooks, who was bear-crawling with a rifle on the roof for about two minutes before he fired at Trump. The Butler County sheriff confirmed to a Pittsburgh-area news station that a local officer attempted to scale the building to confront Crooks but stood down when Crooks pointed a rifle at him.

“I think what you’re going to see is the Secret Service ultimately is going to say, ‘This is our event, everything that happens is under our control,’” Russell said. “But I can tell you from a practical standpoint if I assign an officer to a building and I say, ‘Hey, don’t let anybody in this building,’ I have to count on the fact that that officer is going to do what they’re told to do, and they’re going to be where they need to be.”

Butler Township is a small community north of Pittsburgh. Williams said he suspects that the local law enforcement assigned to the detail was made up of “relatively inexperienced officers that are dealing with a situation they’ve never had to deal with,” and they could have been distracted.

The security professionals and former agents who spoke to National Review said they saw no reason to criticize the agents who jumped on Trump after the shooting started, even though Trump was able to stand up and raise his fist to the crowd, briefly exposing himself.

“That was sort of an act of courage or stupidity, either one. But that’s Donald Trump,” Williams said. “He wanted everyone to know he was okay and he was there to fight. I can’t fault him for doing that. And the agents were doing their best to cover him and evacuate.”

Russell agreed. “By no means were they trying to help him get a photo op,” he said. “I think those agents handled it extremely bravely.”

Some critics have noted that one of the agents who jumped to protect Trump was a woman who appeared to be considerably smaller than the former president. Several of the agents who helped Trump into his vehicle were women.

Sordi said that is fair to point out. The female agent who protected Trump may be a great agent, he said, but “you have to use people where they’re going to be most effective.”

Williams was more direct: Most female agents shouldn’t be on the inner perimeter of protective details. “They’re not strong enough, they’re not fast enough,” he said.

In the wake of the shooting, the Biden administration agreed to provide a security detail to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose father and uncle were both assassinated. The Secret Service has also increased security for Biden, Trump, Harris, and J. D. Vance, Trump’s running mate.

Sordi expects Secret Service security to be “insanely ratcheted up” for the remainder of the campaign season, and he expects a “very, very thorough investigation” into the assassination attempt. House leaders have already promised a “full investigation,” and President Biden has ordered an independent review of the attack.

“Somebody’s going to be called on the carpet on this,” Sordi said, “and ultimately it’s going to land squarely on somebody’s shoulders.”

In the coming months and years, the details of what went wrong will be revealed, Russell said.

“One of the reasons we’ll know every detail is because the Secret Service documents everything that they do: where posts were, why posts were where they were, how many posts were requested versus how many were actually granted,” he said. “It will all be documented: where the police were supposed to be, what they were supposed to do. All of that will come out.”

He was also critical of the armchair quarterbacks and supposed experts who’ve emerged in the wake of the shooting.

“Everybody’s an expert today,” he said. “It’s amazing to me how many sniper experts are coming out of the woodwork. ‘Oh, if I was there I would have done this.’ No, you probably wouldn’t have.”

“The reality is, it’s tough. This is hard work,” he added. “The Secret Service has a zero-fail mission.”

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to note that Donald Trump’s rally on Saturday was near Butler Township north of Pittsburgh.