Is it just that it’s a really fucking hard job? How do you protect someone who wants to travel the country and stand in front of live audiences of thousands of people, without getting in the way of the personal experience they are trying to sell?
If you are as controversial as Trump, anyone can be an assassin and the secret service have to somehow separate crazy fan from crazy assassin, in a thousand different venues. The only real option is a bulletproof Popemobile.
I mean, I definitely wouldn’t want to do their job (and Trump with his thing for rallies is probably extra tough), but I don’t think the drunk driving crashes and visiting sex workers while traveling overseas with the President helps
Yeah, I’ll give you that one. I’m assuming there’s a super tough process to be selected for the secret service, like an astronaut selection process? But maybe I’m assuming wrong.
@mozz@mbin.grits.dev made a really good comment here that I think starts to answer this
I imagine it’s just incredibly difficult to take your job super seriously when any given thing only happens like once every 5-10 years, and probably not to you. I imagine most secret service people who are doing security spend 100% of their careers just standing around and then retire with nothing having happened.
At one point, US embassy security details had this problem, and what they settled on was rotating active-duty combat troops in straight from the field so they were super alert. After about 6 months they would start to relax, and they would rotate them out and have fresh people.
I won’t claim to know what the answer is for the SS but clearly there are some issues with the way they’re doing it.
I could see something like - someone is the best of the best, gets selected for a very prestigious Secret Service posting, then nothing happens and they just have to pick up dry cleaning and watch the fanciest and most pretentious people in the world attend cocktail parties for several years, and eventually they end up visiting sex workers and drinking on duty and things like that
To get assigned to protect a president? Yes, that’s a pretty tough selection process. The Secret Service has other responsibilities, though. Presidential protection details are just one possible assignment. It just happens to be the most high profile and prestigious assignment. But they were actually chartered as a law-enforcement/intelligence branch of the Department of the Treasury, so they also investigate a range of financial crimes, including (but not limited to) forgery, counterfeiting, wire fraud, etc. At the time that it was decided the president needed constant protection (after McKinley was assassinated in 1901), the FBI didn’t exist yet, or else they might have gotten the job.
Someone reported the shooter 3 minutes before the first shots were fired.
“Follow up on suspicious reports” doesn’t sound like it’s a very hard part of the job.
“There’s a shooter in the stadium somewhere, find them in the next 3 minutes” actually sounds like a really hard job.
“There’s a shooter in the stadium, get Trump off the stage” is really fucking easy.
It wasn’t clear from the Trump-visor guy that he actually reported anything, just yelled and pointed and assumed they’d pick up on it. What the security actually saw and heard is another question. Maybe if you see a suspected assassin coming for your godking, it’s important enough to actually leave your seat and talk to someone directly.