Secret Service’s failures validate the entire MAGA movement

The failed assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, one of the worst security fiascoes in American history, reflects a core truth that fuels the MAGA movement and makes the case for reelecting its leader to the Oval Office: Our leading institutions are so corrupted and incompetent that the purported experts who run them cannot or will not execute their most basic functions.

When it comes to the Secret Service, its singular duty is to protect the life and limb of the subjects to whom it is detailed. On July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, it failed that mission in a spectacular fashion.

Unfathomably, the critical organ of the most powerful and sophisticated security apparatus in the history of mankind allowed a would-be assassin, whom we are told had little tactical capability and was operating alone, to assume an unobstructed and otherwise insecure position a stone’s throw from the former president and fire at him, piercing his ear with a bullet.

Well in advance of the tragic incident, the shooter’s parents called law enforcement fearful he was missing. One wonders why they were distressed over the grown man’s whereabouts. Around three hours before the shooting, reports suggest that authorities identified that the shooter possessed a rangefinder. An hour before the shooting, the Secret Service began tracking the shooter as a “person of interest.”

Counter-snipers at one point saw the shooter scanning for them to identify their position, with the Secret Service briefing lawmakers that the shooter was spotted with a rangefinder 40 minutes before the shooting. Twenty minutes before the assassination attempt and 10 minutes before Trump took the stage, Secret Service saw the shooter on the roof of the building from where he would fire. This was a building authorities reportedly occupied but did not secure.

Despite the threat, Donald Trump was permitted to go on stage. And immediately before the shooting, screaming civilians observed the shooter to be crawling into firing position on that roof.

After authorities eliminated the shooter, Trump stood once again exposed as a target on stage by agents too short to cover him. His defiant fist-raising and calls to “Fight,” blood dripping down his face, made for an iconic image that will live forever in American lore. But what if there had been one or more additional shooters? Finally, security rushed the former president to an exit vehicle, where an agent flanking him struggled to holster her gun.

Whether the security apparatus failed to properly plan, resource, communicate, or act, this was an unmitigated disaster that could have plunged the country into chaos. The best explanation is a terrible one: that notwithstanding the courageous and professional actions of some agents on the ground, the Secret Service is grossly incompetent.

Certainly, one might get that impression not only from the events of July 13 but the response of a Secret Service director (picked seemingly out of personal favor over merit by the Bidens), who indicated that agents may not have been perched on the roof from which the shooter fired because of its “slope.”

History shows that the Secret Service has suffered from scandals ranging from White House fence jumpings to unscreened and unvetted individuals approaching presidents, to carousing agents in Cartagena. Congressional investigators were already looking into allegations of inadequate training among agents. A 2015 House report indicated that a Secret Service “in crisis” had been stretched thin through mission creep.

Meanwhile, the Secret Service has been politicized to the likely detriment of its mission through implementing DEI policies prioritizing hiring female agents over the most qualified ones irrespective of sex.

The questions Americans must ask are whether logically so many different failures could have culminated in the near assassination of Donald Trump and what weight we might give to circumstantial evidence suggesting something more sinister transpired.

Among that circumstantial evidence is that the loner shooter — a registered Republican, yet a small donor to leftists — who sought to kill Trump two days before the RNC, profiles as an archetypal patsy. Authorities claim they cannot find a motive for his shooting. The Gen Zer somehow lacks any digital footprint, but what has been leaked to the media indicates he had searched for Republican and Democrat-related content.

So, are we to believe he was an equal-opportunity assassin? And authorities presumed he acted alone even before having examined his devices and conducted relevant interviews. This seems odd.

Meanwhile, no one has been fired for the security failures that took place, and we have seen the Secret Service thwart congressional oversight and at least initially point the finger at local authorities for the catastrophic failures that transpired. Rather than tasking an independent arbiter with leading the investigation into the government’s failures or putting meaningful controls in place to ensure fairness and impartiality to the probe, an FBI and DHS both hostile to Donald Trump are leading the investigation.

If authorities were engaged in a cover-up — and granted, a cover-up of failures would certainly be on-brand — would they operate any differently?

More broadly, the national security and law enforcement apparatus has served as the leading edge of the effort to politically and legally destroy Donald Trump dating back to Russiagate. To alleviate conspiratorial concerns, the security state is going to have to explain how it could have failed so badly and in so many respects, and why we should believe it.

Whether driven by gross incompetence or corruption, the deep state that has for years targeted Trump and millions of dissenting Americans failed to protect the former president’s life last Saturday.

Were it not for a last-second turn of the head and the hand of G-d, he would be dead because of its failings. Those failings proved Trump’s critique of the administrative state fundamentally correct.

The question now is whether the American people will see fit to reelect the man who has warred with those institutions for nearly a decade, as the best and only corrective to the institutional rot that threatened his survival and threatens the very survival of our country.

Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.