After Butler rally, should Trump privatize security detail?

FPI / July 17, 2024

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle told ABC News on Monday that local police were responsible for securing the building that would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed to the roof of to open fire on former President Donald Trump as he spoke at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday.

Local police were inside the building while the gunman was on the roof, Cheatle said.

Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe said in a separate interview that securing the building wasn’t his department’s responsibility.

The shooter was perched on top of a building 150 yards away from where Trump was speaking.

Law enforcement experts familiar with security protocols are simply baffled that the Secret Service would not have personnel on that rooftop.

And that fact begs the question, should Trump ditch the Secret Service and employ his own security detail between now and Nov. 5?

"It could be that this was, as the FBI prematurely (at best) says, a lone nut at work. Even if it is, the story still doesn’t end there, because a security breach this massive — leaving that rooftop unattended such that even a marginally competent marksman could take out the presidential frontrunner relatively easily — does not comport with the level of competence we’re accustomed to expecting from the U.S. Secret Service," Scott McKay wrote in a July 15 analysis for The American Spectator.

"If I’m Trump I certainly want to know whether this is an example of the Secret Service’s core competence degrading to the point of uselessness or an active plot to assassinate me. And I’m going to do my level best to smoke that out."

Additionally, McKay added, "now the word is out that Trump’s event security is trash, which means all the James Hodgkinsons out there will smell blood. Every event could carry a crowd of wannabe assassins thinking they could finish what Crooks started. If this is the best the Secret Service can do, are they up to that challenge? Clearly, no. If what happened in Butler was more of an active betrayal, it’s worse."

And can Joe Biden's team really be trusted to improve Trump’s security. Even before Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had rebuffed the Trump campaign's requests for stepped-up security.

"This is Biden’s Secret Service, after all," McKay wrote. "It’s his little pal Kimberly Cheatle, who used to work his vice-presidential detail before she got a job working risk management for PepsiCo, who’s running the Secret Service into the ground. Cheatle needs to be fired more than any government employee in modern memory, with the possible exception of her boss Alejandro Mayorkas. It’s obvious neither one are going anywhere, which is a giant middle finger in Trump’s face in the aftermath of Butler."

McKay concluded: "We can’t chance a repeat performance from Saturday. Fire these people, do digital events remotely from Mar-A-Lago for a couple of weeks (and let the Aspergers Online Left castigate you on X for “hiding” if they want), and come back with a private sector team of top-flight security professionals neither hired under DEI mandates nor constrained by whatever agenda was at work on Saturday."

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