The Trump Assassination Attempt: Myths, Urban Legends and General Ignorance

It is important to inject some reason and facts into the discourse surrounding the attempted assassination of former US President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on 13 July.

Having planned a number of protective advances and protection missions for the United States Secret Service (USSS), I seek to deflate a few myths, rationally discuss the difficulties of Secret Service protection, and examine the broader political climate that makes this discussion necessary. 

For a basic introduction to the USSS, its 2023 annual report is not a bad start. 

It should not take a huge amount of thought to grasp that an agency of fewer than 8,000 staff has limited capacity. Every Federal agency has a budget. If it runs out of money, there are things it cannot do. 

Although it was rolled into the new Department of Homeland Security in 2003, the USSS also carries on its mission of enforcing counterfeiting and financial crimes laws, a legacy of its origins as a Treasury Department agency in 1865. Those 8,000 staff do an awful lot of things and there’s only so many hours you can squeeze out of an employee. 

But myth and misunderstanding, often drawn from popular culture, prevails. 

Someone from the USSS probably really has welded a manhole cover shut somewhere once. I never saw it in my six years working for it. But this urban legend, while innocuous, is an example of the sort of thing that accompanies the USSS wherever it goes. 

I long ago learned that the general public was broadly ignorant of the full scope of what we did. Some of the misunderstandings are basic, like the fact that not everyone with a badge and pistol is an ‘agent’ – many are police officers, and there are an array of other specialist roles. I was a “senior physical security specialist”, for example. 

Terminology doesn’t help either. The USSS is not “secret” in any modern sense. Nor is it an intelligence agency. Yet, I occasionally encounter people who confuse the USSS with the CIA.

Some people believe that the USSS consists only of the men and women in dark suits you see on television. They are ‘the working shift’ and very much the tip of an iceberg that juts above the waterline. 

Other people think that hundreds of agents or officers are available for days or weeks ahead of every single visit by a protected person. Claims that the USSS should have guarded the roofs in Pennsylvania for 48 hours straight ahead of the Trump rally, where the former President was shot at, fall into that category. 

The USSS is seen to be ubiquitous, all-seeing, and very powerful. And it can be, when it wants to be very nearly like that. At a cost. But like any human organisation, pulling that off in one place at one time, will draw away from its ability to do it anywhere else at the same time. 

It is also important to note that the myth of ubiquity, omniscience, and omnipotence is tolerated by the agency. It is part of a broad strategy of deterrence, and one that has worked more often than it hasn’t. But it can lead to unrealistic expectations. 

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Protection: Building an Onion

Protecting a president, a former president, a candidate, or some other important person requires a layered approach. 

There is a firm understanding that no one preventive or response measure, human process, or technology will prevent all deliberate or accidental harm to a protected person. It is like building an onion. No one single layer is going to protect against all harm. 

Outer layers include deterrence, which is ethereal and hard to articulate, protective intelligence, and diligent advanced team work. 

Numerous middle and inner layers include armoured limousines, a ‘working shift’ that does its job, lots of people standing post in positions for hours, screening the crowd for weapons, using dogs and military technicians to search for explosive devices, control of airspace, and specialist teams such as counter-surveillance, counter-sniper, counter-assault, and counter-chemical/biological. (I worked on the latter). 

A few innermost layers are there for mitigation after-the-fact, like medical plans and evacuation routes. Many of these layers rely extensively on outside agencies, such as local police departments. In my own experience, I had local cooperation that ranged from excellent to ‘please stay home, you’ll just cause more problems’. Sometimes a protective operation requires people from dozens of small local agencies. During a busy campaign year, the USSS’ ability to do the necessary relationship-building and liaison can wear thin. 

The problem stems from the fact that not every layer is consistently available all the time or with the same quality. Budget, personnel, and logistics dictate that the resources, particularly specialist ones or expensive ones, are more sparsely devoted to non-presidential missions. 

A VP, a visiting head of state, a former President, or a candidate simply will not normally rate all the layers of the onion and some of the layers that do get allocated will be thinner. 

Sometimes this parsimony is deliberate. The USSS has vicious bean-counters who watch every dollar. Sometimes it simply can’t be helped. 

Armoured glass in a hotel room in Toledo does not magically get teleported to Cancun. Corners do get cut. Very good people make very good efforts to make sure that the corner-cutting is both invisible and not a detriment. 

On a VP or a candidate trip, one person might be doing three or four roles on the advanced team instead of just one. Busy travel schedules and last-minute changes, and campaigns are notorious for this, compressing the timeline. Add fatigue into the equation. The onion layers get frayed and are translucent at points. 

It is also important to recognise that one layer of the onion is luck. It is considered axiomatic in counter-terrorism that the bad guy only has to be lucky once – the guardians have to be lucky every single day. Sometimes simple bad luck happens. Illness, accidents, bad weather all take their toll. 

The protective environment is complex and is vulnerable to bad luck. Good luck saved Donald Trump. 

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The Broader Environment

USSS protection takes place in a landscape that is inherently dangerous. It takes no deep insight to see that the broader political environment is largely outside of the control of the USSS. 

Polarisation of attitudes, a loss of unity, degradation of dialogue beyond partisan boundaries, and the decay of civility in political discourse all make this harder. The problem is compounded by alternative world views in online ecospheres and widespread belief in baseless conspiracy theories.

Communication style has lost constraint. Violent language and aggressive political opinion ends up as actual instigation of violence. These are global problems. But America has an added one: the prevalence of military arms and ammunition gives the poisoned discourse the means to cross from word to deed. 

We may not know what invective the Pennsylvania shooter had in mind, but there is no doubt that there has been a deep well of invective. 

The USSS has its protective role because it is fundamentally antithetical to America’s constitutional values to allow one man with a bullet to cast the only vote. 

We should not let that happen.  

Dan Kaszeta spent six years in emergency planning in the White House Military Office and six years in the US Secret Service