The Secret Service Makes Me Nervous

Greetings from Ukraine, where, notwithstanding constant Russian bombardment through till morning, it's still safer than a Saturday night out in DC. Immediately following the excitement at the White House Correspondents Shoot-Out, the Director of the Secret Service, Sean Curran, stepped to the microphone and said:

Tonight, we saw exactly what our brave men and women do each and every day.

Yeah, you can say that again - and probably will, in late spring, early summer or so. Butler, Pennsylvania... West Palm Beach, Florida... Washington, DC... A famous line of Ian Fleming's seems more germane:

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.

Which begs the question: if it's enemy action, who precisely is the enemy?

The perp is the usual pliable boob out of central casting - in this case, a "Teacher of the Month" from California. But the interior of a DC hotel shouldn't be that hard a venue to secure. Even forty-five years ago, when Ronald Reagan was shot at the very same Hilton, the would-be assassin had to wait till the President was leaving the joint and take a potshot on the sidewalk.

I have thought that the world's most lavishly funded protection detail were total rubbish ever since I observed them at Bush campaign events in New Hampshire twenty-two sodding years ago, where the front door was the usual chaos but the back door was wide open and unsecured.

Then came the Obama-era "Cartagena Hookers" episode, in which the twenty-one agents claimed not to have known their companions were ladies of the evening. That's to say, these are the only guys on the planet who can't walk into a nightclub and spot the professionals: I know that's what I'm looking for in my security detail. As your niche Canadian wrote at the time :

He made the fairly basic mistake — for an expensively trained government operative — of attempting to pay a prostitute in the hotel corridor, and Dania caused an altercation whose fallout has brought the Secret Service to its knees. Which isn't how these encounters usually go.

Still, there are limits to how incompetent even federal agencies can be. Oh, wait. Not at the Secret Service there aren't:

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'...

The basic facts of Butler should chill the blood:

In the last seventy-two hours, we have learned there were at least three government snipers in the very building whose rooftop the assassin was trying to access. They sat inside and watched him through the windows, as he arrived and peered up at the roof, and then wandered away.

They watched him when he came back and took out a laser range-finder to calculate the distance between the building and Trump's head, and then left again.

They watched him a third time when he returned with a bulky backpack.

They watched him for the best part of half-an-hour ...and then they let him go ahead and shoot the Republican presidential candidate.

Yet here's the kicker:

Almost two years later, they're all still working for the federal government.

Less than a month ago, at the Philadelphia airport, one of Jill Biden's Secret Service detail accidentally shot himself in the foot. I remember thinking at the time that this was just a little too cute - almost as if (not to go too conspiratorial too early on the morning after) it was to plant an obvious reminder to the public of the total crapness of the Secret Service just ahead of yet another ostensibly ridiculous security failure.

Surely nobody can be this bad this often and pay no price for it? Not in a functioning "republic"? Among those present at the Hilton last night were RFK Jr, who lost his father and his uncle to assassins, and Erika Kirk, whose husband was killed just last September. Mrs Kirk was hustled out of the hotel's hideous subterranean ballroom in tears. Earlier this month, she had pulled out of a TPUSA show with JD Vance on "security" grounds. Which seems an odd thing to do at a Vice Presidential event under Secret Service protection.

Yet perhaps, sadder but wiser, Charlie Kirk's widow knows a thing or two about "security". Look at the ease with which the gunperson gets past security simply by running at them:

As I wrote the day after Butler:

Let's cut to the chase - the US Secret Service: In on it? Or just totally crap?

I don't think it's possible to be this rubbish this often. If the object of a thing is, as they say, its outcome, then the object of the United States Secret Service these last two years is to enable the increasing number of Trump-deranged persons to take a potshot at him. But, even if you incline to cock-up rather than conspiracy, their dysfunction is unreformable.

[UPDATE! "Known wolves" aren't just for Islam anymore: a relative called in the name of the shooter before the dinner but the lethargic bureaucracy could not rouse itself to act even though he was registered at the Hilton under his real name.]

Me at a speech in DC just after Butler:

The last word from @MarkSteynOnline: "The Secret Service is beyond repair. We have to abolish it and start again. And break up the Department of Justice!"

We will be livestreaming and live tweeting the rest of our Constitution Day celebration tomorrow. https://t.co/5n9qalo70z pic.twitter.com/6e4jKJIEE9

— Hillsdale College (@Hillsdale) September 19, 2024

If I were Donald J Trump, I wouldn't want these guys anywhere near me. But then again he has no choice in the matter:

Why does Trump still have these guys in the house?

Oh, that's right: because, if he ordered them to leave, they'd shoot him in the back for trying to escape.

Which leads necessarily to deeper and darker speculations: A couple of hours after my friends at Powerline post their Iran War headline "Trump Better Have a Rabbit in That Hat", a rabbit bigger than that White House Easter Bunny shows up. But who's inside the suit?

Okay, that's a little too conspiratorial for me without a second cup of coffee, but it's clear that, to put it at its bare minimum, there is a Deep State and consequently, after Butler, after West Palm Beach, after many similar events, there is a great eternal void where a plausible narrative ought to be. Are we living in a simulacrum? Or is the simulacrum just an obvious simulacrum to detour us into an alternative simulacrum of rube conspiracy theories?

Maybe I'll go back to bed...

And so it will go. I'd say more but the air-raids have begun again and I'm being ordered to the bomb shelter. It's almost as if Victoria Nuland knows what hotel I'm staying at...

Mark's international bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. If you haven't read the book during its first seventeen years, well, you're missing a treat. It's still in print in hardback and paperback. (Buy it at a 77% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 47% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)