The same agency that failed to protect former President Donald Trump from a would-be assassin’s bullet is now asking the GOP’s presidential candidate to stop holding large outdoor campaign rallies. The request from the grossly incompetent (at best) federal agency stinks of election interference and sounds a lot like a threat.
As The Washington Post first reported Tuesday evening, the U.S. Secret Service is “encouraging” the Trump campaign to halt the large-scale events his supporters have grown accustomed to.
“In the aftermath of the shooting, agents from the Secret Service communicated their concerns about large outdoor rallies going forward to Trump campaign advisers, three people familiar with the matter said,” the Post reported, not naming its sources.
Trump’s team, at least according to the Post story, is scouting larger indoor arenas to accommodate thousands of rallygoers. The campaign “is not currently planning any large outdoor events, a person close to Trump said.”
The Trump campaign told The Federalist it does not comment on the former president’s security detail.
“All questions should be directed to the United States Secret Service,” campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement.
The Secret Service did not return an email from The Federalist requesting comment. So it’s not clear whether the agency has made the same requests of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrat Party establishment’s anointed fill-in for President Joe Biden after the cognitively depleted executive’s X account posted a statement announcing he is dropping out of the campaign. If the Trump-hating Post asked that question, it didn’t report the answer in its story.
‘Direct Threat’
House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., told Fox News that it “would be a shame” if the Secret Service shut down the outdoor rallies.
“I think people enjoy going to them and I think, you know, you can get more people outdoors than indoors,” Comer said. “He attracts a big crowd, obviously. I think the president will do what the president wants to do.”
Others were more pointed.
“If I saw this in The Babylon Bee it’d make far more sense,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, mocked the agency on his X account. “The idea that they’d tell Trump to stop holding rallies is embarrassing — for the Secret Service.”
“This is unreal,” Trump backer “End Wokeness” wrote on X. “Secret Service is now asking the Trump campaign to stop doing outdoor rallies. How about you do your f*ing jobs?”
“This is a direct threat from the regime to Trump: if he doesn’t stop trying to win, they’ll make sure the next attacker doesn’t miss. We all know what they’re doing,” tweeted Federalist CEO Sean Davis.
Blaming Trump
The Post devoted several column inches to what a burden Trump’s outdoor rallies have been for an agency that glaringly failed its mission to protect him. The Post’s narrative is anything but subtle: Trump — and his penchant for massive campaign rallies — is to blame for his near-assassination.
“The rallies have long been viewed as onerous by the Secret Service because they include complicated outdoor venues with thousands — if not tens of thousands — of people,” the Post’s Josh Dawsey writes. “Most other former presidents rarely appear in public, and when they do, they usually appear in settings such as conferences and restaurants with fewer people. Trump requires a much larger security footprint than other past presidents because he holds so many large events.”
But Trump isn’t merely a former president showing up to a haughty cocktail party with D.C. elites. He’s the GOP’s candidate for president, whether the Post and their Democrat pals like it or not.
On an accompanying point, would other former presidents draw such interest? Does the current president? As the Post notes, Trump’s rallies are so much more than standard campaign events. They’re how the political outsider has campaigned for the better part of a decade. He loves it.
“We’ve seen from the early days of his presidency even, and before that during his first campaign in 2016, how important crowd size is to him. It gives him a lot of joy and energy being with large crowds. He feeds off their energy. It’s almost like a source of comfort for him,” Sarah Matthews, who served as deputy press secretary in the Trump White House, told the Post.
U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said it’s ultimately up to the former president where and when to hold rallies.
“My advice to the campaign is to hire an independent security expert to oversee security provided by the Secret Service,” said Johnson, whose office is looking into the conduct of the agency.
Shutting down the outdoor events would smack of election interference, a way to stymie a successful means of campaigning.
Harris made her first campaign stop as the Democrats’ presumptive top of the ticket on Tuesday in suburban Milwaukee at a high school. The Associated Press boasted about the “roaring Wisconsin crowd” but didn’t bother to report on the turnout.
‘Questions Building’
Trump rallies have been made all the more “onerous” for the Secret Service because the agency has repeatedly denied the Trump campaign’s requests for tighter security. That fact, among many others coming to light, explains in part why a 20-year-old gunman was able to climb onto the roof of a nearby building at Trump’s rally earlier this month in Butler, Pennsylvania, and fire several rounds at the former president and the crowd before being fatally shot by a Secret Service sniper. The shooter struck the GOP presidential hopeful in the ear, injured two rallygoers, and killed another.
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned Tuesday after a heated congressional hearing the day before in which she acknowledged that agents were informed of a suspicious person on the grounds multiple times before the shooter fired. The Secret Service knew the roof, within 150 yards of the rally stage, was a point of vulnerability.
Late Tuesday, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released law enforcement body camera footage that shows officers on the roof where the gunman opened fire. Counter-snipers are seen speaking to a Secret Service agent while the gunman is lying on the roof, blood streaming near his apparently lifeless body.
“The footage starts while the officers are discussing if the dead man next to them is the same one seen in a photo sent out by a member of Beaver County’s sniper team,” Newsweek reported. “Reports previously surfaced that there were three snipers stationed in the building that [shooter Timothy] Crooks scaled to shoot at Trump. One of those officers spotted Crooks before the shooting and reported a ‘suspicious person’ in the minutes leading up to the assassination attempt. That sniper also took a photo of Crooks.”
The video was obtained from the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit in compliance with congressional requests. The same cannot be said for the Secret Service and other federal law enforcement agencies, which have thus far refused to release records related to the assassination attempt.
“For the past 10 days, questions have only been building regarding the catastrophic security failure that occurred on July 13. Federal agencies, particularly the Secret Service, have failed to be transparent with the American people,” Grassley, ranking member on the Senate’s Budget Committee, said in a statement.
