Americans Slam Secret Service Over Protection of Trump

A majority of 64 percent of Americans believe that the Secret Service failed in their duty to protect Donald Trump during the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13 where he survived an assassination attempt, according to an exclusive poll for Newsweek.

The results obtained by the Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll, which was conducted on Monday among 1,750 eligible voters in the United States, show that Americans blame the Secret Service for failing to secure the rooftop from which the gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, shot at Trump, grazing the former president, killing one person and injuring two more.

Among Trump voters, the percentage of those who believe the Secret Service failed to protect the Republican presidential nominee went up to a staggering 83 percent, while among those who voted for Joe Biden in 2020, it was 55 percent—still a majority of respondents.

The same feeling seems to be shared by lawmakers questioning security officials over the failures that led to Trump being shot.

After a contentious House hearing last week where she was asked about how Crooks could have dodged the security checks put in place to protect the former president, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned, saying she was taking full responsibility for what she called the agency’s “most significant operational failure” in decades.

“The Secret Service’s solemn mission is to protect our nation’s leaders and financial infrastructure,” Cheatle wrote in her resignation letter. “On July 13th, we fell short on that mission. The scrutiny over the last week has been intense and will continue to remain as our operational tempo increases. As your director, I take full responsibility for the security lapse.”

Both Republicans and Democrats had called for Cheatle to resign in a rare show of bipartisan unity.

A majority of 54 percent of Americans polled by Redfield & Wilton Strategies said they supported Cheatle’s decision to resign in the wake of the assassination attempt.

As questions over the agency’s security failures during the rally continue, acting Director Ronald Rowe Jr. attended the Senate hearing on Tuesday, acknowledging that the incident represented a “failure, on multiple levels.”

Crucially, he wasn’t able to answer how Crooks got on a rooftop so close to the rally’s stage with an AR-15-style gun without being questioned or stopped. Rowe told the Senate that agents committed “policy violations” that would be “held accountable” and that the Secret Service had already identified “gaps in our security” that are being fixed.

One such gap was the failure to deploy a drone ahead of the rally because of cellular connectivity issues.

Witnesses at the rally told news media that they had spotted the gunman crawling on the rooftop with a rifle within five to seven minutes of Trump speaking on stage and alerted police officers of his presence. Neither police nor Secret Service officials, according to witnesses, intervened to stop Crooks before he started shooting. Secret Service agents then shot Crooks dead.

According to Rowe, officers had noticed that Crooks had a range finder, but their suspicions of it “had not risen to the level of threat, or imminent harm” to former President Trump. He said it was indefensible that the roof had not been secured.

“What I saw made me ashamed. As a career law enforcement officer and a 25-year Secret Service veteran, I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured,” Rowe said on Tuesday.