Let's cut to the chase - the US Secret Service: In on it? Or just totally crap?
Well, I've thought the Secret Service were rubbish not just since we learned of the Cartagena hookers but for at least another decade before that. And increasingly, when it comes to American officialdom - from Kabul to Uvalde - to modify Henry Ford, you can get it in any colour as long as it's bloated, lavishly over-funded and entirely dysfunctional.
And yet and yet... it's hard to believe even these guys (plus their bevy of five-foot-two-eyes-of-blue Keystone chorus girls) could be this crap. Assuming for the purposes of argument that the body on the roof is actually that of the perp, a goofball barely out of high school hatched a plan to have Donald Trump's head explode in close-up on live TV - and, wittingly or otherwise, the world's most flush money-no-object security state did their best to help him pull it off.
In any accountable "public service", the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secret Service gal would already be gone. By this point after the Argentine invasion of the Falklands, Lord Carrington (Foreign Secretary), Sir Humphrey Atkins (Lord Privy Seal) and Richard Luce (Minister for Latin-American Affairs) had already resigned: see my column of September 17th 2001 expressing in my naïve Canadian way mystification as to why, six days later, all the 9/11 flopperoos had not been similarly dispatched.
Because that's how it goes in the Republic of Non-Accountability, and, if he's harbouring any doubts about his fitness for the job, Mayorkas figures it can wait till someone takes out RFK Jr. This is a depraved political culture.
What's the old line? When seconds count, the police are minutes away? Not at a Secret Service event: even when the police are on site in massive overwhelming numbers, they're still minutes away. Here are fifty-two seconds of members of the public yelling that "he's on the roof":
NEW - Trump Assassin video shows him crawling on the roof while multiple people point him out to police
They yelled about him for *almost an entire minute*
It's insane how Secret Service allowed this amateur to almost kill Trump pic.twitter.com/CWfHBGzOCp
— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) July 15, 2024
Where are all the cool guys with the reflector shades and dangling telephone cords? Or even the club-footed pint-size Keystone Rockettes? Under Mayorkas, have all the Cartagena hookers moved to Butler, Pennsylvania?
But it gets better (at least for those who want Orange Hitler dead). From the Associated Press:
Not long before shots rang out, rallygoers noticed a man climbing to the roof of a nearby building and warned local police, according to two law enforcement officials.
One local police officer climbed to the roof and encountered Crooks, who pointed his rifle at the officer. The officer retreated down the ladder, and Crooks quickly took a shot toward Trump...
Uh-huh. Actually, over half-a-dozen shots - hitting the target, killing retired fire chief Corey Comperatore, and gravely wounding two others. As I noted yesterday:
Thomas Matthew Crooks took his AR-15 to a political rally. And the reason he was permitted to do so is because he was 'outside the security perimeter' ...yet still within range of the candidate's head.
Does that make sense even by the arseholian standards of the federal government?
No. Even in rinky-dink no-account third-rate basket-cases, it's understood that the first job of a protection detail is to establish where the lines of fire are, and neutralise them.
Can the failure to do that really be accidental?
Yet from the decision to demarcate the easily accessible rooftop as "outside the security perimeter" all else follows. Once it was determined by the Secret Service that the building with the spiffy line of sight was beyond their purview it ceased to be of any interest to them. So that fell to local law enforcement - and a village constable shinning up the ladder.
Here, for example, is an ex-Secret Service guy absolving his old comrades from responsibility for what happened:
So in summary, when looking for blame in this massive security failure, if I was a betting man, I'd say the answer rests with whatever detail (likely local LEOs) were assigned to the area near the outbuildings.
Wait a minute. The only reason the Secret Service was in Butler, Pennsylvania was to take a bullet for the forty-fifth president. If the Secret Service chooses to "assign" part of that responsibility to others by shrinking its perimeter, that's on you.
Oh, but why are they shrinking the perimeter anyway? From RealClearPolitics White House correspondent Susan Crabtree:
Secret Services resources were diverted to Jill Biden's event and away from Trump's because they followed agency protocol applying to Trump as a former president, according to two sources within the Secret Service community...
Who made the decision to divert the resources to Jill Biden's event?
"Agency protocol": So Trump, who's the first "defeated" incumbent to run again since Grover Cleveland, is being treated like any old "former president" - like Jimmy Carter back in Plains, say. Because "agency protocol" is so inflexible that's just how it is.
On the other hand, Dr Jill is being bulked up and treated as the candidate, which, given that Joe's back in Delaware watching Matlock and eating tapioca, she might as well be.
So, if the "resources" are being "diverted" elsewhere, the Secret Service can do one of two things:
a) Its job, and attempt to rise to the occasion; or
b) Shrink the perimeter, and assign the space to the Keystone cops.
Like I say: In on it? Or Zen levels of total crapness? An alternative take from Mann vs Steyn defence witness Stephen McIntyre:
who remembers the novel and film The Day of the Jackal? Compare portrayal of diligent law enforcement 50 years ago to Biden administration excuse that roof 150 yards was "outside the designated perimeter" and thus ignored by Secret Service. And the local policeman who approached... https://t.co/xauKB6Oiy7
— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) July 14, 2024
Ah, but The Day of the Jackal is set in France. And in France, as in most countries, the only police are "the police" - in the Jackal's day, a Gendarmerie nationale and a Sûreté that both report to the same national government. In America, "the police" are many and various - federal, state, county, municipal: see any old press conference after any old mass-shooting with representatives of thirty-seven different law-enforcement agencies huddled behind the mike stand like a clown car shooting for the Guinness Book of Records. After that, the usual snobbery kicks in: once a building's been sloughed off on the local lads, no Secret Service types will give it another thought.
So it was left to the rally's attendees to notice there was a gunman climbing to the roof, and they did their civic duty and brought it to the attention of "the police". But what's the policeman whose attention they brought it to supposed to do?
Speak to the Secret Service guys on the stage with Trump through those super-cool earpieces and let them know they need to hustle the candidate away? Er, no. He's the village constable, so he's too déclassé to have access to the federal earpiece crowd.
Set aside the Uvalde better-part-of-valour retreat back down the ladder ...except to consider how long it would take. Like I said, when seconds count, the money-no-object Secret Service are minutes of cumbersome local/federal liaison away. Like I also said, in any functioning public service Mayorkas and the Pepsi gal would already be gone.
In on it? Or just crap beyond belief? Everything that's emerged in the last twenty-four hours takes me back - twenty years, to the 2004 campaign, when the then First Lady, Laura Bush, came to New Hampshire to do an event at the Lebanon Opera House. For the benefit of non-American readers, I should explain that this is not an opera house in the sense of La Scala or Covent Garden. It's a municipal government office with a modest auditorium on the upper floor. Come the big day, the Secret Service lads were everywhere ...yet they left the Lebanon Clerk's office in the basement wide-open. When the New Hampshire lady organising the event notified the agents of "this obvious problem", she was told that "advance" had covered it.
So out front there was the usual chaos, with Granite Staters backed up down the street waiting to shuffle through the metal detectors. But, if you just walked round the back of the building, you could enter through the open and unguarded door of the clerk's office and take the open and unguarded elevator up to the floor of the event, where the door opened on the other side of the Secret Service screening process. So anyone could access the "secure" area unimpeded.
Because the clerk's office had been determined to be "beyond the perimeter".
The New Hampshire organiser was not happy about this, and, after surveying the scene, rustled up a couple of off-duty Granite State copper types she recognised on the street to guard the elevator at both ends. Bonus insight into cumbersome yet ineffectual federal security theatre:
We dutifully collected hundreds of social security numbers from attendees in advance for 'background checks' only to learn they didn't actually run them ('not enough time').
I have never taken the Secret Service seriously since. So I am not surprised to learn that a fellow can take an AR-15 to a Trump campaign event without going through security and climb up the roof to a position with a clear line of sight to the target's head - and that, even as multiple members of the public point this out, the minutes tick by.
So to come back to my opening question: Just the usual crapness augmented by a bit of good luck on the would-be assassin's part? Or something worse?
On Saturday, America came within an inch and a second of crossing a very dark Rubicon. As Trump reveals to Michael Goodwin in The New York Post:
The doctor at the local hospital, which has a trauma center, told him he's never seen anyone survive getting hit by an AR-15.
Indeed. Because that's what just happened. In 1981 Reagan was hit by a revolver; forty-three years of ever more extravagant security protocols later, a loser whose greatest accomplishment was a cameo in a BlackRock ad was able to hit the head of a president with his AR-15.
And this startling fact is of less concern to a corrupted American media than the fact that a few "loud bangs" at a Trump rally might provoke, ooh, a violent backlash from the crazy Maga types...
There will be more to come in the ensuing months. Because, as Joe Biden correctly emphasises, in America we resolve our differences at the battle box:
Biden: "We resolve our differences at the battle box. That is how you do it. At the BATTLE box." pic.twitter.com/Z82PuMVrro
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 15, 2024
No joke!
~We thank you for all your support these last grisly few months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
It was a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, including Mark's initial reaction to the attempted assassination of Trump. He also marked the second anniversary of his landmark one-hour special on victims of the Covid vaccines. For his Saturday picture date, Rick McGinnis plumped for Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton in Reds, and Mark Steyn on the Town went very French, but with a side-trip to Vanuatu. Our marquee presentation was the launch of Steyn's latest Tale for Our Time, Bulldog Drummond by Sapper: you can find Part One here, Part Two here, and Three here. Part Four airs tonight.
If you were too busy trying to point out the guy on the roof to the Secret Service telephonist at 1-800-KILL-SHOT, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
