Trump Is Lucky To Be Alive – I Have Some Questions

I am not an expert in protective details. I have worked with them extensively in the field. I also have well in excess of thirty years of experience in clandestine operations, both preventing them and carrying them out on enemy soil. From that perspective, let me ask some questions about what happened yesterday in Butler, Pennsylvania when Donald Trump came within a hair’s breadth of being assassinated.

How did the shooter know he could safely and securely occupy the elevated firing position from which he shot? You don’t grab your AR, climb up on top of a roof a little over a hundred yards from a guy under Secret Service protection and hope that you have line of sight, that there is no Secret Service team already on the roof or that you will not be shot by a sniper with overwatch. You KNOW those things before you climb up there.

How?

The more sinister answers would involve this being some kind of inside job and collusion between the shooter and the people “protecting” Trump. Anybody who has been following the news the last many years would be hard-pressed to say that is impossible.

A more prosaic answer would be that the shooter was allowed the freedom of maneuver to sit and watch as the Secret Service set up and thereby identify the gaps in their protection. That would mean that the Secret Service failed to deploy any meaningful counter-surveillance presence in advance of the event. In other words, they didn’t have anybody out on the ground watching for pre-attack surveillance and preventing bad guys from gathering intelligence.

We are already hearing significant buzz that Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas had repeatedly denied requests to beef up Trump’s detail. It therefore seems more than plausible that the men and women in Butler were working without all the tools they needed.

How is it possible Secret Service left an elevated firing position in proximity to the stage unsecured? The best information I have says the rooftop from which the shots were fired is 130 yards from the stage where Trump was standing. A halfway decent shot with a modern AR and good sights in broad daylight shooting from a supported firing position will hit his target every time at this range. Saying the rooftop was outside the secure area begs the question. Why was that location not secured?

Are we back to a matter of resources or are we now moving into the realm of incompetence? From the standpoint of the Secret Service, this is quite plainly something that should never under any circumstances have been allowed to happen.

Why were the Secret Service agents on stage so slow to react? Watch the video. There is an audible gunshot. Trump swats at his right ear as if he has been stung. Trump drops to the ground. Only then do the Secret Service personnel closest to him jump on top of him.

That’s not how that is supposed to work at all. Those agents have to move at the sound of the shot. At that point, it is irrelevant to them whether a bullet just zipped past Trump’s head or some idiot in the crowd is shooting at another idiot. All that can be sorted out later. The first priority is to protect the principal.

What does that mean? It smells like maybe we were seeing a team not acting at peak efficiency. Are we back to a question of resources or are we talking about a Secret Service that has lost a step? There has been a lot of talk about the Secret Service chief, who used to run security for Pepsi, making her primary focus diversity, equity, and inclusion. Has that rot taken the edge off the Secret Service?

Why was the Secret Service so slow to get Trump out of the area? Much has been made in the press about a radio transmission to all agents reporting the shooter had been killed. That transmission apparently came only seconds after the shot was fired.

From the standpoint of the Secret Service that transmission more correctly should be translated as a shooter had been killed. Maybe he was the only one. Maybe he was part of a team of six. Maybe the main event had not even really started. Perhaps the next move on the part of the attackers was going to be the introduction of a drone carrying an explosive charge.

All they really knew was they were on the “X” and they needed to move. They did so but far too slowly.

Why?

Information is still flowing in. No doubt we will discover things in the near future that will clarify the picture considerably. All I really know right now is that Trump is lucky to be alive, and I have questions.