Nate Gowdy/Mother Jones
A notable trend over the last few years has been the Republican discovery of jail. I don’t just mean that a lot of Republicans have simply ended up there, although a number of them have. But as scores of January 6 defendants cooled their heels in Washington, DC’s, notorious detention center, they and their supporters came to the obvious and sensible conclusion that the DC jail is a terrible place. In some cases, this led to a genuine awakening about the broader state of criminal justice in the United States. But in others, it resulted in a kind of ideological resistance to that reality. Rather than grasp the totality of the criminal justice system’s failings and the cruelty of the carceral state, they concluded that this must actually be some sort of targeted punishment against them. It couldn’t really be this bad.
I thought of that dissonance this week, as I listened to conservative chatter at the Republican National Convention (and elsewhere) about the Secret Service’s handling of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. It has been clear since almost immediately after the shooting—since at least around the time of the BBC’s interview with “Greg”—that the Secret Service failed in a catastrophic way. Their missteps led to the death of a retired fire chief and nearly to the death of Trump.
But why did they not react?
On Tuesday in Milwaukee, I watched Rep. Cory Mills of Florida, an Army veteran and former private defense contractor who had previously worked in the field of “executive protection,” explain to Charlie Kirk, the conservative pundit, influencer, and organizer (among several other things) the basics of sniping from rooftops. Kirk broadcasts a live edition of his Real America’s Voice show from an open-air studio across from the Fiserv Forum; if you’re in the area, it’s hard not to eavesdrop. He pointed to the roof of a hotel at the end of a block, just outside the security perimeter. It was about 160 yards he said—how hard would it be to hit a target from there? Mills didn’t hesitate.
“I could take anyone in this audience right now who’s never picked up a rifle, pull a rifle out of a standard Walmart that is not a manufactured rifle for a sniper capability, and within 10 minutes, I can make that nine out of ten times for a person who’s never picked up a rifle—this is how simplistic that shot is.”
I don’t know whether or not that’s true, but I believed him absolutely. There was an ominous strain to what Kirk and Mills discussed, though. They wanted to know if this was an inside job. If maybe—maybe, to be clear, just maybe—someone at the Secret Service had just thought, for a second too long, that they should let this one go.
“Were there people that wanted Donald Trump dead but didn’t do their job?” Kirk asked.
“There is such negligence here that I pray and I hope that that’s exactly what it was,” Mills replied. “But the more that I look at this, as much as I don’t want to be this conspiracist, I’m just gonna go ahead and say this: First they tried to silence and censor [Trump], then they wanted to indict and imprison him, now they want to kill him. We need to start having a proper investigation so at minimum we can share with American people with confidence that this was just negligence.”
Neither of them immediately concluded that the answer was “yes,” in other words, but they would like to see hearings. (As would I!) But they are not the only people asking very concerned questions. Elsewhere, I’ve seen misinformation suggesting that the Secret Service ordered a sniper not to fire, among other false claims. The search for something bigger comes, in part, from a disbelief at the bleak reality. There was no other way to explain how a prestigious law enforcement agency could fuck up like that. It couldn’t really be this bad.
I can’t really begrudge a certain level of disbelief from people who are understandably shaken. (Do you know how paranoid the response was to the Lincoln assassination?) But much like the condition of the DC jail, there’s also a reality waiting to be acknowledged: Yes, law enforcement really can be that bad. The Secret Service has a huge budget, incredible amounts of training and ability, and a huge list of recent fuck-ups. In 2017, a guy jumped the White House fence and wasn’t spotted for 15 minutes. In 2014, a guy got into the White House with a knife. A few years before that, two complete randos crashed a state dinner. There has been a prostitution scandal, and a drinking scandal. The Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig wrote a whole book about the crisis at the agency. And if the Secret Service can whiff like this and act like that, you better believe that local law enforcement agencies can. Just consider how many agencies and officers—with how many hours of special training and millions in funding—failed to respond to the mass shooting at a high school in Uvalde, Texas in 2022. Or how often they kick down the wrong door and shoot the wrong person’s dog—or the wrong person.
If a close encounter with the prison system could turn some right-wingers into reformers, perhaps a kajillion-dollar security failure might cause a few more people to question the competence and infallibility of armed agents of the state. Or maybe they’ll just settle on a familiar scapegoat. Before they went to break, Mills snuck in a dig at Kimberly Cheatle, the agency’s first female director.
“Look,” he said. “DEI means D-I-E.”
