Staff Reports
The recent botched assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump has stirred up a pot of questions that even the most optimistic Secret Service supporter might find challenging to defend. Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent turned talk show host, couldn’t contain his disbelief as he weighed in on how security somehow managed to miss a would-be assassin. At the same time, a cellphone camera captured video of him parading on a roof right across from Trump. If a regular citizen armed with a phone can spot the danger, one must wonder what kind of blindfold the professionals were wearing.
The incident involved a man named Thomas Matthew Crooks, who made himself apparent, moving about on the rooftop like a poorly camouflaged squirrel before disappearing and then reappearing again a short time later. Bongino, with his decade-plus experience in the Secret Service, has raised eyebrows over the acting director Ronald Rowe’s explanation that local operatives were preoccupied with some vague “issue” during the shooting incident. If “the three o’clock” position was under scrutiny, it raises the real question: How does one miss an assassin in plain sight?
Dan Bongino shocked over new phone footage capturing Trump’s would-be assassin https://t.co/jWkZhWawHm
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) August 2, 2024
Bongino humorously derided the notion by pointing out the absurdity of this failure. He emphasized that this wasn’t some elite film crew capturing Leonard DiCaprio evading dinosaurs; it was just a cellphone video and not even a good one at that. How could highly trained agents with all sorts of fancy gear overlook something so blatant? If the Secret Service can’t handle a roof-mounted threat, what sort of “protection” can one expect at an event with absolutely no global implications?
Rowe’s comments after the fact only fueled the fire, suggesting that none of the countersniper teams or Trump’s security detail had a clue that there was even a gunman on the roof. This revelation could be deemed as an “epic fail,” or in Bongino’s humorous phrasing, a failure of “apocalyptic” proportions. The argument starts to feel like a scene from a sitcom where security is just an overpaid doorman.
As for Rowe, this is where the domino effect kicks in. After Kimberly Cheatle threw in the towel as the director following less-than-stellar testimony to the House Oversight Committee, Rowe has so far failed to inspire confidence that the Secret Service has learned a single thing. Bongino suggested Cheatle’s resignation should have happened much sooner, but the patterns here indicate a deep rot at the core of what’s meant to be America’s top security detail.
Adding fuel to the fire, Joe Rogan, the podcast powerhouse, shared his initial belief that such a dramatic event might catapult Trump into the winner’s circle come election season. However, he later expressed concern that the media has done an impressive job of scrubbing the memory of the assassination attempt from the public’s consciousness, paving the way for unlikely scenarios, like Kamala Harris finding herself as one of the few remaining contenders in the upcoming election. In a world where such missed threats are handled with a shrug, anything seems possible.
