Is it just that it’s a really fucking hard job? How do you protect someone who wants to travel the country and stand in front of live audiences of thousands of people, without getting in the way of the personal experience they are trying to sell?
If you are as controversial as Trump, anyone can be an assassin and the secret service have to somehow separate crazy fan from crazy assassin, in a thousand different venues. The only real option is a bulletproof Popemobile.
Someone reported the shooter 3 minutes before the first shots were fired.
“Follow up on suspicious reports” doesn’t sound like it’s a very hard part of the job.
I think ginger Wayne Static even said that from the angle of the roof the shooter was on, secret service couldn’t actually see him. I guess until he exposed himself to take the shots.
Quick edit: They still should have pulled Trump from the stage. If there are multiple people yelling that there is someone with a gun on a roof, you don’t let Trump keep talking lol, like wtf.
It wasn’t clear from the Trump-visor guy that he actually reported anything, just yelled and pointed and assumed they’d pick up on it. What the security actually saw and heard is another question. Maybe if you see a suspected assassin coming for your godking, it’s important enough to actually leave your seat and talk to someone directly.
I mean, I definitely wouldn’t want to do their job (and Trump with his thing for rallies is probably extra tough), but I don’t think the drunk driving crashes and visiting sex workers while traveling overseas with the President helps
Yeah, I’ll give you that one. I’m assuming there’s a super tough process to be selected for the secret service, like an astronaut selection process? But maybe I’m assuming wrong.
I imagine it’s just incredibly difficult to take your job super seriously when any given thing only happens like once every 5-10 years, and probably not to you. I imagine most secret service people who are doing security spend 100% of their careers just standing around and then retire with nothing having happened.
At one point, US embassy security details had this problem, and what they settled on was rotating active-duty combat troops in straight from the field so they were super alert. After about 6 months they would start to relax, and they would rotate them out and have fresh people.
I won’t claim to know what the answer is for the SS but clearly there are some issues with the way they’re doing it.
I could see something like - someone is the best of the best, gets selected for a very prestigious Secret Service posting, then nothing happens and they just have to pick up dry cleaning and watch the fanciest and most pretentious people in the world attend cocktail parties for several years, and eventually they end up visiting sex workers and drinking on duty and things like that
I am not in security, but I have worked in secure areas. The way you prevent issues is having multiple layers of security that watch each other.
Like you prevent individual employees from committing fraud by having other employees sign off on their work. Then you prevent those employees from colluding to commit fraud by having another group of employees monitor their actions. Finally a third group of employees audits everyone occasionally (at random).
This way it requires at least 4 people who don’t know each other to do anything illegal. I’m sure the Secret Service could do with some audits. Like literally have an entire team of Secret Service people test them, trying to trick them into making a mistake.
Somewhat unrelated topic, but this is why driving is so dangerous at a population level. Most of the time, nothing happens even if you take a bunch of risks. But if enough risks occur at the same time, people die (Swiss cheese model).
To get assigned to protect a president? Yes, that’s a pretty tough selection process. The Secret Service has other responsibilities, though. Presidential protection details are just one possible assignment. It just happens to be the most high profile and prestigious assignment. But they were actually chartered as a law-enforcement/intelligence branch of the Department of the Treasury, so they also investigate a range of financial crimes, including (but not limited to) forgery, counterfeiting, wire fraud, etc. At the time that it was decided the president needed constant protection (after McKinley was assassinated in 1901), the FBI didn’t exist yet, or else they might have gotten the job.
I imagine it’s just incredibly difficult to take your job super seriously when any given thing only happens like once every 5-10 years, and probably not to you. I imagine most secret service people who are doing security spend 100% of their careers just standing around and then retire with nothing having happened.
At one point, US embassy security details had this problem, and what they settled on was rotating active-duty combat troops in straight from the field so they were super alert. After about 6 months they would start to relax, and they would rotate them out and have fresh people.
I won’t claim to know what the answer is for the SS but clearly there are some issues with the way they’re doing it.
He talks about there being blood if loses. Relaxed gun regulations and appointed Judges that will keep it that way. When you act like a strong man expect stupid shit.
And so fucking what. What are they gonna do. Are they gonna outlaw the exact thing that SCOTUS decided because it suddenly occurred to them that a sword cuts both ways? No. They just going to make a lot of fucking noise to rile up their own base. We all know where this is going and it’s nowhere good. And the worst part - the worst part? America was able to bail Europe out of the debacle when it happened last time. There’s nobody to bail us out of this cluster fuck.
Ummmm you might care to remember that the USSR also “bailed out” Europe.
You know…in the sense that you were dragged into a war you had no intention of joining, by a foe that had already gone 11 rounds with the UK and Russia.
The UK spent an entire empire “bailing out” europe. Twice. But we don’t hark on about it.
But you’re right about one thing - no one is coming to bail you out. You’ve made it abundantly clear you will only act unilaterally. Europe will stay in its lane, quietly hope that Trump has a stroke, but ready to stand on its own for a 3rd time.
That’s not exactly surprising - I’m pretty sure a first-year law student would do as much. The real question is will it actually get dismissed. Normally I would suspect not, but we live in the weirdest fucking timeline, so who the hell knows.
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