Why did the Secret Service fail to protect Trump?

Evan Vucci's photograph of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is seen in the background as Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle testifies before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee last month

(Image credit: Kent Nishimura / Getty Images)

By The Week UK

published 3 August 2024

The "single greatest operational failure" in decades. Those were the words that the Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle used last week to describe her agency's handling of the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump. It was the only part of her testimony to a congressional hearing that lawmakers were happy to accept, said the Star Tribune (Minneapolis). She otherwise succeeded in uniting them in exasperation with her stonewalling. They wanted to know why the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was able to perch atop a warehouse roof with an AR-15-style rifle less than 450 feet from Trump's podium. They wanted to know why no one prevented Crooks shooting, given that a Secret Service sniper had noticed him 30 minutes earlier using a gun rangefinder, and even rally attendees had alerted police to a suspicious man, shouting, "He's on the roof!". Cheatle, who later resigned, couldn't explain those failures. "What are you hiding, my friend?" demanded Republican Lisa McClain.

What indeed, asked Tristan Justice in The Federalist. It's hard not to suspect foul play, given the string of extraordinary security lapses. Crooks was able to case out the area with a surveillance drone only hours before Trump's speech, and was identified by local police as suspicious before the rally even began. Cheatle said the roof from which Crooks fired was left vacant because it was too "sloped" to access safely, yet it was in fact relatively flat. Did the Secret Service actually want Trump to be killed? Of course not, said Patrick B. O'Shea in The Hill. This was down to "complacency", not conspiracy. We like to think of Secret Service agents as being the "best of the best", but even professionals can "get sloppy". It was a small rally in a small town in rural Pennsylvania – and they took their eye off the ball.

It's not the first time they've slipped up, said The Washington Post. A knife-wielding intruder breached the White House in 2014, and an uninvited couple were able to crash one of Barack Obama's state dinners. Agents hired sex workers during a presidential trip to Colombia in 2012. A bipartisan investigation described the agency as "in crisis" nearly a decade ago, highlighting understaffing and a lack of accountability. With three independent probes under way into the Crooks case, this may be a moment for a wider overhaul of the Secret Service.