No failure, regardless of how monumental or catastrophic, is ever so bad that President Joe Biden and his lieutenants won’t try to spin it into some kind of success. Because no Democrat will ever admit failure, there’s never any accountability when things go unimaginably bad.
Witness the spectacle of Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Monday defending U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who is facing a growing chorus of calls to resign, and declaring he has “100 percent” confidence in her and her agency in the wake of an assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump on Saturday at a rally in western Pennsylvania.
“What you saw on stage on Saturday, with respect to individuals putting their own lives at risk for the protection of another, is exactly what the American public should see every single day,” he said — adding, in a note of absurd self-aggrandizement, “It is what I indeed do.”
The president himself, in a Monday interview with NBC News, echoed Mayorkas’ line about individual agents putting their lives on the line and then said it was an “open question” whether they did what they needed to do to prevent the assassination attempt.
But of course, they did not do what needed to be done, otherwise it wouldn’t have happened. The failure of the Secret Service in this regard is mind-boggling in its completeness. There is no way they could have failed in greater measure — except to have literally done nothing and allowed the shooter to empty his magazine at Trump. Yet the Biden administration is chalking this up to an exemplary success and claims to still have “100 percent confidence” in the Secret Service.
All this comes as new, jaw-dropping details of the Secret Service’s failure come to light. Olivia Rinaldi of CBS News posted on X Monday evening that snipers were stationed inside the building where the would-be assassin staged his attack. They saw him beforehand, outside looking up at the roof. He left and came back and they watched him use a range finder. They took a picture of him and called it in to the command post. He came back a third time with a backpack and then disappeared around behind the back of the building.
Keep in mind that video footage from rally attendees confirms that a bunch of people saw the shooter well before he fired from the rooftop and struck Trump in the ear. They filmed it. In the video clips, people yell, “He’s on the roof!” “He’s got a gun!”
As far as sniper assassination attempts go, this might be the most telegraphed attack in history. Yet the Secret Service failed to act until after the shooter got off five rounds, one of which hit the former (and likely future) president in the face — and another of which killed an innocent husband and father in the crowd, Corey Comperatore.
Surely Mayorkas knows all this, which means there’s only one reason he has “100 percent confidence” in the Secret Service: They allowed the assassination attempt, or at least issued an order to stand down until the would-be assassin fired first. That’s the only reasonable explanation here, and if it’s true, then it’s one of the greatest scandals — and acts of treason — in American history.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say it was just a monumental failure, a display of incompetence that beggars belief. In that case, we see a pattern here we’ve seen throughout the Biden presidency, in which every failure, no matter how objective it is, no matter how mind-bogglingly complete, is somehow chalked up to success by Biden and his band of incompetents.
The catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan was actually a logistical feat! Who can forget Gen. Mark Milley bragging about how many people were evacuated in so short a time — with no mention of why they had to be evacuated so fast and how many thousands were left behind to be victimized by the Taliban? He did this — and Biden repeated the talking point — even after 13 U.S. soldiers were killed in a suicide bombing at the Kabul Airport.
Or take the ongoing, never-ending border invasion under Biden. Mayorkas has insisted for the better part of three years that there is no crisis, that the border is under control, and that actually, the men and women of Border Patrol are doing a great job under very difficult circumstances, and blah blah blah it’s not a failure, it’s a success. Never mind that some 10 million-plus illegal immigrants have flooded into the country on Biden’s watch and that no small number of them have proceeded to rape and kill American citizens after being released from federal custody.
In every such case, Biden officials act like the American people are simply too stupid to recognize these failures for the successes they actually are. Afghanistan was a feat of logistics. The border is a feat of administrative processing. The assassination attempt was a feat of selflessness by the individual agents.
And that’s another thing: They always hide behind the poor saps who have to carry out their insane, disastrous policies. No one doubts the courage of individual soldiers in Afghanistan or Border Patrol agents along the Rio Grande or the Secret Service agents who rushed the stage in Pennsylvania. What we doubt is the ability of the people in charge even to recognize the difference between success and failure.
For them, every failure is actually a success, which means there is never accountability because nothing ever goes awry. Imagine the confidence it would give the American people if Biden came out and announced that U.S. Secret Service Director Cheatle has been asked to resign, along with Mayorkas, in light of the assassination attempt against Trump. That would actually give Americans some confidence that their leaders are still tethered to reality, or at least that they are sometimes forced to recognize the truth and act on it.
But instead, we have an unstable admixture of incompetence and malice — and an enraging absence of accountability.
