Advice To Trump: Fire The Secret Service

I mentioned in Sunday’s special-edition Five Quick Things column that my novel King of the Jungle, which The American Spectator subscribers got to read in serial form earlier this spring before it was published (you can still do that, if...

The post Advice To Trump: Fire The Secret Service appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

I mentioned in Sunday’s special-edition Five Quick Things column that my novel King of the Jungle, which The American Spectator subscribers got to read in serial form earlier this spring before it was published (you can still do that, if you haven’t, here), contained a plot point which was unnervingly similar to what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, Secret Service and all …

The shooter who almost took him out was a 22-year-old male whose name was James Alfred Sterling, but he had demanded that people call him Shirley.

And yes, Billy Ray memed the shit out of that.

Sterling left a manifesto which held that killing Trumbull was a heroic attempt to save “Our Democracy,” and a blow against “American fascism.” It talked about how he had traveled back in time in a vision and killed Hitler before he took power in Germany, and that vision proved to him that he — well, they — was destined to take out “the modern Hitler which is so much worse.”

Katrina Duvalier, Joe Deadhorse’s press secretary, was caught on a hot mic saying Shirley Sterling was the greatest American patriot since the Rosenbergs. You’d think that would have been the absolute end of her career, but it only made a minor ripple when Dieter Poocey, the White House correspondent for Fox, asked her if she understood what a patriot was and then expressed doubt when she insisted she did.

When he got shot, Trumbull was at a rally in Terre Haute, having just won the Indiana primary and thereby sewing up the Republican nomination. At the time Sterling popped him he was talking about firing everybody at the EPA and letting the states take over environmental regulation. Such is the reduced state of American fascism, I guess.

The bullet broke his clavicle, missing his heart by six inches. Christy Hazel earned himself a two-day suspension from MSNBC by quipping that Trumbull had no heart to miss.

…

But when we dug down into the facts of the case, what we found was explosive as hell.

They’d changed out the head of Trumbull’s Secret Service detail. DeAndre Taylor, who had been with Trumbull going back to his time in the White House, had been forced out because of some bogus sexual harassment claim filed against him. And his replacement, a lady named Pauline Chang, was the daughter of a San Francisco import-export guy who’d been a huge donor to both Omobba and Deadhorse.

And in the book there were consequences …

First, Trumbull simply fired the Secret Service. He put out a statement saying that he’d hired his own in-house security team for the campaign, headed up by a guy named Ellis Marcado, who had been a staffer for the National Security Council when he’d been president. Marcado had done some heavy work as an Air Force special operator and he’d been a CIA contractor — he’d cycled out of Benghazi only a week or so before that whole thing had gone to shit. He was known.

And the campaign put out a statement saying that owing to his recovery and the effort to put a first-class security team together, Trumbull’s campaign was going digital for the next few weeks. He was going to do a lot of remote-broadcast rallies, internet town halls and the like until the convention from his big estate in Boca Raton.

…

It turned out that two key members of the Secret Service detail protecting Trumbull, that Chang was newly in charge of, had been taken off the job almost immediately before Trumbull’s rally in Terre Haute.

And they weren’t replaced. The detail was understrength when Trumbull was shot.

So in Terre Haute the Secret Service was missing somebody working one of the doors to the basketball arena that Shirley Sterling ended up coming through, and also missing was the Secret Service agent that was supposed to be next to the stage where Sterling ended up standing when he began blasting away at Trumbull.

What I’m hoping is that since life followed fiction in a very bad way on Saturday, perhaps it will follow fiction in a better one in the next several days.

Donald Trump needs to do what Donny Trumbull, his fictional doppleganger in the book, does when the Secret Service lets him down in a highly suspicious way.

The book has a scenario which is a bit more obvious and nefarious (maybe) than what we saw on Saturday. As an author of fiction you generally don’t want to overwork your readers with plots which are too opaque and complex; most of them are sitting on a beach or in an airplane and they’re just looking for some entertainment. So I kept the assassination plot pretty simple.

But it was awfully plausible, no?

And at the end of the day, what happened on Saturday doesn’t really look like the product of all that complex a conspiracy.

Yes, I’m saying what you think I’m saying. I have glued my tinfoil hat on tightly.

The fact of the matter is that the FBI’s knee-jerk statement that what happened in Butler was just a “lone gunman” showing up and shooting at Trump is simply not credible.

It’s an insult to our intelligence. It’s as laughable as the accompanying statement that “we can’t get into his phone.”

If you can’t get into his phone, how do you know he did this by himself?

And it’s glaringly obvious the FBI can’t be trusted to run a real investigation. The FBI might be the last government agency we should trust to investigate this.

As I noted Sunday, there are two questions that must be answered before anybody in the Executive Branch ought to be allowed to say anything else.

The first one is: what was Thomas Crooks doing on that roof not 150 yards away from Trump as he began speaking?

And second: how would Crooks get the idea that he could get up on that roof in the first place?

Because if you were plotting to assassinate Donald Trump at that site on that day, and you were looking at a satellite image of the grounds, you would look at the American Glass Research building where Crooks situated himself for his final moments on this planet and this is what you’d say …

“This would be the perfect location. But I can’t use it. They’re going to have people on that roof. They’d have to.”

And yet that’s the roof Crooks climbed up on, in full view of lots of spectators who were quite vocal in pointing out that he was there to local law enforcement. Apparently, a Butler County sheriff’s deputy climbed a ladder to get to that roof and Crooks pointed his rifle at the deputy, which backed him down the ladder. Crooks then began firing at Trump. And on Monday we found this out…

JUST IN: The building that Thomas Crooks climbed on top of and fired from was the staging area for the police tactical team according to ABC News.

Holy sh*t.

“The building where gunman Thomas Crooks scrambled onto the roof and opened fire was the staging area for the local… pic.twitter.com/QRZNGB8XXy

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 15, 2024

I wonder what might have happened had that deputy pointed his service pistol in the air and popped off a full clip in succession. You’d think the Secret Service team might have gotten Trump off the stage, or at least covered him up before Crooks could shoot at him.

Perhaps not.

I’ve seen a lot of discussion by people who do this kind of work for a living, ex-military snipers and security pros for example, who say they’re not at all impressed by the work of the countersnipers who ultimately took Crooks down. That this was way too slow.

I don’t know how suspicious that is. I’m willing to believe that there could have been confusion about who Crooks was as he took his position on that roof. It’s possible the Secret Service thought maybe he was Pennsylvania state police and the state police thought he was a sheriff’s deputy, or that maybe he was part of whatever private security group Trump is using to staff his events. Maybe that was being hashed out until Crooks fired, and once he did he was toast. (READ MORE from Scott McKay: Five Quick Things: George Clooney, Sad Clown)

There’s another thing out there which is a post on 4chan from someone claiming to be the countersniper who shot Crooks, and that post alleges the countersniper demanded permission to take Crooks out for more than two minutes before it was finally given. I have some doubts about that, and frankly, even if it was true I’m wondering why you wouldn’t just take him out or at least ping him with a near-miss to scare him away.

Or report a possible shooter on that roof so the body team could move Trump off that stage to safety.

None of this makes any sense, but the way to make sense of it is for Trump to dump the Secret Service the way Donny Trumbull does in the book.

The fact that Crooks chose to climb up on that roof tells me there had to be some inside play in what happened on Saturday. It doesn’t even have to be that some elaborate plot was in effect. Think of this as a crab trap — you know that the hills and dales are crawling with psychopaths who’d like to take a pot-shot at Trump, so you bait that trap for Trump by leaving a major security breach available at all of his campaign stops in the knowledge that one of the crazies could eventually get lucky.

Or, obviously, it could be more elaborate than that. There are all kinds of suspicious things about this kid. That’s for another column.

But 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.

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.

But for my purposes it doesn’t matter in the short run.

What matters is that I can’t trust the Secret Service. It’s worse than worthless; it’s an active drag on my campaign. My eventgoers won’t cooperate with the Secret Service anymore, because the folks will now believe they’re in on a plot to kill me. And it doesn’t appear the Secret Service is capable of dispelling those notions. At least nothing we’ve seen so far indicates that.

So functionally and logistically, none of this works.

Furthermore, 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 for all of his empty rhetoric about “unity” and “coming together” following Saturday’s near-miss assassination, Joe Biden can’t be trusted to improve Trump’s security. This is Biden’s Secret Service, after all. 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.

Let’s remember that it was the hand of God that saved Trump. Nothing else. If his head had been turned in any other direction Crooks’ bullet would have blown a hole through the back of his cranium.

Had that happened we might very well be facing the prospect of a full-scale civil war in this country. Had Trump been shot and killed on Saturday his outraged supporters would have put the Biden administration and the Democrat Party in their own crosshairs, and there would be no talking them down with calls to “come together.” No one would have believed any of it. The blood would have run.

That’s what the stakes are.

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. (READ MORE: Again, These Democrats Are the Villains)

He’s indispensable to the American revival we so badly need. We almost lost him. We can’t have it happen.

Get rid of these people. Now.

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